As the honest beer brand, Newcastle delivers a dose of refreshing honesty by calling bollocks on deceitful marketing gimmicks. No event is bigger or more gimmicky than the Super Bowl. It’s also the one week when Americans actually seek out ads.

Our goal: Hijack the conversation and become the most talked about brand in the big game without actually being in the big game.

Our solution: Create a hypothetical big game ad that we could've made if we had the money, talent and permission to advertise in the game. But just because we didn't make it, it didn't stop us from hyping up how epic it would have been if we had.

Utilizing multiple channels and pieces of content, the campaign included a storyboard of our hypothetical ad, a trailer for that storyboard ad and a teaser for the trailer of that storyboard ad. We made videos of behind-the-scenes interviews with celebrities who would’ve starred in our ad, including Anna Kendrick and Keyshawn Johnson. On game night, we released our own storyboard versions of other brands’ ads minutes after the real ads aired.

The campaign took off immediately, garnering 10 million views across 15 pieces of content. Collectively the campaign garnered 615 unique media stories and generated over 1 billion media impressions, totaling over $11 million in earned media. Newcastle received a 416% brand lift (versus 187% for competitors) at 1/35th of their budget, and saw an 18% bump in purchase intent in January and February.

The campaign played out across multiple channels in the ten days before the big game. Beginning with a teaser video on our owned social channels, we released new campaign pieces each day to tell a rich, unfolding story. IfWeMadeIt.com, our microsite, housed all content and teased upcoming pieces.

Subverting the big game marketing gimmicks, we made a special ad for Reddit making fun of crowd-sourcing. We aired ads for the ad we didn’t make on ESPN2. We partnered with Gawker to publish advertorial calling out advertorials. We used Twitter to interact with our stars to escalate their “feud” with us.

The “If We Made It” campaign took off immediately, garnering 10 million views across 15 pieces of content. Collectively the campaign garnered 615 unique media stories, appearing on Conan, Forbes Business, BuzzFeed and Time and generated over 1 billion media impressions, totaling over $11 million in earned media. Newcastle received a 416% brand lift (versus 187% for competitors) at 1/35th of their budget, and saw an 18% bump in purchase intent in January and February.