Convince the parochial market of Victorian men to break with tradition and drink inside the James Boag’s Draught marquee during the 2012 Melbourne Cup. History shows that Victorian men prefer to drink Victorian beer, like Carlton Draught, which enjoys a 70% market share. This made our brief difficult, as success meant encouraging publicly disloyal behaviour at their state's biggest annual event.

The strategy was to win over Victorian men by giving something they’d been missing for years – some real race day fun.

Realising it was women who’d traditionally been getting all the attention at the Melbourne Cup, with their outlandish fascinators stealing the limelight, we designed a range of fascinators especially for men, and made them available inside our marquee throughout Cup week.

TV, outdoor, and press ads launched the idea and directed men to our marquee; while the fascinators themselves enjoyed attention on various TV and news programmes. During the carnival, hundreds of men proudly paraded their fascinators around the track, helping to draw more men into our marquee, where they drank Boag’s, took photos and shared them with their mates online.

James Boag’s Draught Fascinators changed the way Victorian men experienced the Melbourne Cup; and changed the way they saw a brand that previously wasn’t on their radar. In just two weeks the brand became the talk of Melbourne, generating 5 million earned media impressions, and pulling in $3.8 million worth of PR. More telling was our marquee, which experienced a heavy increase in traffic, and sold 3650L of beer over the course of the carnival (a 1014% increase on the 350L sold the previous year). In fact, we sold out of our entire week’s allocation on the very first day.

James Boag’s Draught’s communications positioning is based on the pure waters of Tasmania, whose magical properties just 'make things better'. So what better way for a Tasmanian beer brand to win the hearts of Victorian men, than by making the Melbourne Cup a genuinely better experience for them. No other beer brand, not even their beloved Carlton Draught, had done this before.