Integrated

The Super Bowl is a big day for advertising, and an even bigger day for beer sales. So Newcastle Brown Ale vowed to do whatever it took to get an ad in the game. But we didn’t have $4.5 million dollars to buy airtime.

So instead of paying for airtime alone, we decided to take a cue from the sharing economy, split the cost of airtime with 20-30 scrappy brands like ours, and then cram all 20-30 brands into one Super Bowl ad. We essentially sold ad space in our ad. We called it Newcastle’s Band of Brands. We asked Brands to join our ad weeks before the game and launched

the finished ad online days before the game, featuring a record 38 brands in 60 seconds. On game night, the ad aired in Palm Springs, California, the one local market we could afford.

Newcastle set out to hijack the brand conversation for the second straight year, and that's exactly what we did. Collectively the campaign pieces amassed 34 million views across 6 pieces of content, with 430 unique earned media pickups, all of which amount to more than 2.3 billion impressions.

Dollar for dollar, Newcastle saw a lift in brand conversation that outperformed the Big Game’s “official” beer brand sponsor brand by a factor of 500. Talk about fiscal responsibility.

Before our call for brand partners, we proactively contacted several brands to ensure we’d already have a few on board. We then shot a skeleton version of our final Big Game ad that incorporated our partner brands while leaving room for the brands that would eventually join. After our call-for-entries launched, we received over 400 more brand requests; more than we could anticipate or fit comfortably into sixty seconds. Though a challenge, we were able to smash together a brand-packed Big Game spot with 37 different brands, which we then pushed it out on all 37 of their social pages.

We defined our audience as “Better Beer Drinkers.” These are guys 21-35 who wouldn’t quite consider themselves to be “craft-exclusive,” but had considerably more sophisticated palates than the domestic light beers of the world could offer. They’re also the type of guys who know beer marketing B.S. when they see it: the gimmicks, the cliches, the deceptive, disingenuous messaging. That’s why our “No Bollocks” strategy is all about pulling the vail back on this type of marketing, give them a little bit more credit, and shoot them straight: “We want your good money for our good beer.”

And what’s more bollocks than overhyped, overblown, cliche Super Bowl advertising? Nothing, that’s what. That’s why the Big Game is a perfect opportunity for Newcastle to call bollocks on the whole affair, despite not having the money or the permission to do so in the first place