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 Super Bowl is the biggest, most-hyped, most star-studded marketing week of the year, especially for beer brands. It’s also the one week when Americans actually seek out ads instead of skipping them.

Banned from actually making a Super Bowl ad due to our limited budget and a competitors’ billion-dollar exclusivity deal, our goal was to hijack the conversation and become the most talked about brand in the big game.

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.

The Anna video alone has more than 5.2 million views on YouTube alone. 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.

We released a new campaign piece each day, unfolding as a cohesive and progressive story. We also used our stars’ Twitter accounts and even talk-show interviews to tell the story of their “feud” with us.

The Anna video debuted on Entertainment Tonight hours before her appearance on Conan, where she discussed working with Newcastle and aired a clip from the video. Upon its debut and release, it became the second-most popular video on YouTube that day.

In the days following, Anna’s media tour drove a huge response, receiving coverage in big entertainment outlets (E! Online, Extra, HLN) and others (Maxim, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Mashable, etc.).

With the growing reactionary sentiment to the exorbitant sums of money shelled out for 30 seconds of big game airtime, and by being refreshingly honest about the fact that we didn't have money to make an ad anyway, we knew there was a PR-worthy opportunity for Newcastle to work around these conventions by subverting them entirely.

Knowing that borrowing equity from celebrity endorsements is a common Super Bowl tactic, we sought to do the same to help Newcastle break through the din.

We didn't have Action-Movie-Hero/California-Governor money, so we had to be smart about choosing our celebrity talent.

With her critical success, upcoming film roles and depth of social media involvement and engagement, Anna Kendrick was a natural fit for the campaign.