Beer advertising is typically one of two things: highly stylized, aspirational fluff or an appeal to the lowest common denominator. But when you’re a beer from Newcastle, England, where people don’t take themselves too seriously, you do things a little different. You tell it like it is.In this campaign, we poke holes in everything most beer companies hold sacred. Newcastle’s heritage, its founder, hometown and brewing process are all fair game. As is the entire beer category at large.The integrated campaign also features in-bar posters, neon signs, coasters, tap handles and commercials filmed with director Ivan Zacharias that give an honest look at the city Newcastle Brown Ale calls home. It’s beer advertising without all the bollocks that usually comes with beer advertising.

To launch our No Bollocks campaign we looked at how traditional beer advertising is typically launched and did our own No Bollocks version. They launch with commercials, we launch with No Bollocks commercials. They have billboards, we have No Bollocks billboards. They have tap handles, coasters and posters in bars, we have No Bollocks tap handles, coasters and posters in bars. They have YouTube and Facebook pages… you get the idea.

The first comprehensive presentation of the campaign was at the Heineken National Distributors Conference in April - it is the biggest Heineken event of the year where they present annual marketing campaigns to their key distributors. The reaction to the campaign was raucous laughter, whooping and huge applause.The client is so impressed they have reconfigured their entire year's media plans to maximize the use of the videos created for the No Bollocks campaign.The 'Who Uses the Word "Chalice"?' print ad caused a huge stir online, including being tweeted by Ant & Dec, UK TV presenters and the Newcastle Brown Ale audience's most high profile Gerodie stars.The campaign launched too recently for us to have metrics on consumer reaction at this point.