Victoria Bitter (VB) fans love having an ice-cold VB while watching our national cricket team play, especially against England. With the 2019 Ashes tournament being played in England, the international time difference meant the two couldn’t be enjoyed together.

VB was also recently replaced as the sponsor of the Australian men’s cricket team by one of its key competitors. So we needed to disrupt the moment and generate all the benefits of a sponsorship, without having one. VB Tea was designed to quench the thirst of VB cricket loving fans in their late-night time of need, and dominate headlines worldwide.

VB, long synonymous with Australian cricket, was no longer a sponsor of the Aussie cricket team, with VB’s arch-rival having recently become the new sponsor of the team.

The brief was to steal share of conversation around the 2019 Ashes series, hosted in England. This was a conversation VB had no right to be part of.

Given the legal restrictions surrounding sponsorship rights (or lack of them in VB’s case) our challenge was to find a way to be part of the Ashes occasion without using the words ‘cricket’, ‘Australia’, ‘The Ashes’, or any player or on-field imagery.

Given the time difference between Australia and the UK, we knew cricket fans would be staying up into the small hours of the morning cheering on their Aussie heroes.

But the stamina and levels of alertness required for late-night cricket-watching aren’t compatible with beer drinking. After a couple of beers, fans would be falling asleep instead of staying awake.

So, if beer wasn’t relevant in helping fans enjoy the Ashes experience, what was?

Our answer was VB Tea - a new product adjacency that would quench the thirst of Aussies cricket fans and crucially, help them stay awake.

This was a move guaranteed to get loyal VB fans talking and to pique the interest of Aussie media commentators everywhere.

Knowing that our core audience would be VB loving Cricket fans (men 35-55 years old), and our core objective was to generate significant media coverage, VB Tea had to be an authentic representation of the VB brew that consumers and media alike know and love.

Working with an Australian tea maker, we combined Black Ceylon tea and VB’s Super Pride Hops to create a full flavoured Australian tea, rich with character. The mellow tannins of the black tea complemented the earthy bitterness of the hops, delivering a patriotic cuppa worthy of the green and gold.

We then conveniently packaged them into boxes of 24, replicating a case of beer.

The product development was at the heart of the PR strategy, and once it was perfected, all that was left was to simply get the tea into the hands (and mouths) of media across the country.

To promote our new brew, we created a series of online videos that were a parody of our own famous ads – directing consumers to our merch store to buy their own box.

We used these films and additional still and video content to roll-out a nationwide media engagement program that saw us appear in print and online across the News Corp network, as well as across every TV network in Australia with the trifecta of Sunrise, TODAY and Studio 10 to kick-start a week’s worth of editorial activity.

In support was a series of targeted influencer content, with 50 bespoke VB Tea kits sent to cricket personalities letting them know that they were some of the first in the country to trial VB’s newest brew.

Our low-budget campaign successfully stole headlines during the launch of a key competitor’s major sponsorship and thrust VB into the spotlight at a time when it had no right to play.

Results:

We sold 4.5 boxes per minute, selling out in 24 hours.

21,000 website visits (92% new customers)

The story was picked up in: Germany, Ireland, S.Korea, NZ, Turkey, UK and USA.

30+ million impressions

153 pieces of TV coverage alone

$1.2 million in earned media

798% ROI

All achieved with $0 in paid media.

Demand was so high, so we partnered with The Steve Waugh Foundation to auction off The Final XI boxes during the last test of the Ashes series. One of the boxes sold for over $400AUD with all of the proceeds going to charity.

And the most important result? VB secured 14x more mentions throughout the Ashes than our key competitor.