The Super Bowl is the biggest, most-hyped marketing week of the year, especially if you’re a beer brand. But Newcastle Brown Ale didn’t have the money to make a Super Bowl ad, and even if they did, their deep-pocketed competitors’ billion-dollar contract banned any other beer from advertising in or even mentioning the game.

So we turned that weakness into a strength, creating a fully integrated campaign about the epic Super Bowl ad Newcastle could have made if we had the money. We treated it like any big, overhyped Super Bowl ad, releasing teasers, trailers, a storyboard of the ad, focus-group reactions and behind-the-scenes videos with the stars who would have been in it. On game night, we even tweeted our own epic storyboard versions of other brands’ ads minutes after the real ads aired, showing them how we would’ve spent their millions.

The campaign took off right out of the gate, with the teaser topping many “best of” teaser lists. It further took off from there, garnering 10 million views across 15 pieces of content. When all was said and done, the campaign garnered over 1 billion impressions. It received 600 organic media mentions, was included on nearly every Super Bowl “best of” list, and appeared on Conan, Forbes Business, BuzzFeed and Time. It became the number one trending topic on Facebook for two days running, ahead of even the game itself.

And all this attention got results. Newcastle Brown Ale received a 416% brand lift compared to our competitors’ 187% with only 1/35th of their big game budget. We also received an 18% bump in purchase intent in January and February. Not bad for an ad we didn’t make.

The campaign unfolded across multiple channels in the ten days leading up to the big game. We began by launching a teaser on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. After that, we released a new campaign piece each day, so it played out like a story. IfWeMadeIt.com, our interactive hub, acted as a home for our campaign and teased upcoming pieces.

We utilized multiple channels, allowing us to poke fun at many big game marketing gimmicks while telling a rich story. We made a special big game ad for Reddit that poked fun at crowd-sourcing. We aired ads for the ad we didn’t make on ESPN2. We partnered with Gawker to write an advertorial calling out other advertorials. We used our stars’ Twitter accounts and even talk show interviews to tell the story of their “feud” with us. And on game night, we tweeted other brands with storyboard parodies of their ads.