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.

As the honest beer brand, Newcastle is about bringing refreshing honesty to deceitful marketing gimmicks. No event is bigger or more gimmicky than the Super Bowl. But it’s also the one week when Americans actually seek out ads. But we didn’t have the money to make a Super Bowl ad, and even if we did, our competitors’ billion-dollar contract banned any other beer from even advertising in the game.

To hijack the conversation, we created a fully integrated campaign about the Super Bowl ad Newcastle could have made if we had the money. Like any big, overhyped Super Bowl ad, we released 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 created storyboard versions of other brands’ ads after their real ads aired, showing them how we would’ve spent their millions.