If there is newsjacking, can there also be “adjacking”? Apparently, as Newcastle Brown Ale has hijacked the conversation about Super Bowl ads with its online “If We Made It” campaign.
Saving the $4 million cost of broadcasting a 30-second ad during the game, the company and its agencies instead did some longer videos with relatively inexpensive production costs, seeded them through paid and organic social media, and have reaped millions of views.
The public rollout of the campaign began about ten days before the Super Bowl (a term which, since they didn’t pay to advertise on it, they can’t use in their promotions, so they call it the “S**** B***” instead). They ran trailers with over-the-top, grand music and nothing but text on a black screen and, in the more elaborate version, animated storyboards of outrageous advertising concepts and a focus group’s responses. These received hundreds of thousands of views.
The blockbuster ad of the campaign features Anna Kendrick complaining about how she was supposed to be in a big Super Bowl ad for Newcastle, but then they didn’t have the money to do it. This very funny two-plus minute rant is getting over one million views a day on YouTube, and a ton of tweets, posts on Facebook, and articles about it. Newcastle has received millions of free “earned” impressions. Newcastle claims that on all sites the video received over 5.5 million views in the first couple days. And it’s reaching the target audience of 24-34 year old males. (In one of the early trailers the text says, “We’re going to treat you like a target market and you’re going to love it.” Apparently they were spot on.)
They seeded this through ads on Gawker and Facebook, tweets by Anna Kendrick to her two million plus followers, and in other ways. Another similar video featuring former pro football player Keyshawn Johnson is getting a couple hundred thousand views a day. Not bad, but then he’s not “beer commercial hot”, like Kendrick.
Newcastle plans to roll out additional videos and media on game day. Just not on TV during the game. They can’t afford that. (Compare that with Anheuser-Busch, which has spent $149 million on Super Bowl advertising over the past five years.)
This campaign is right on brand for Newcastle, which has used whimsical ads mocking beer advertising conventions for some time, such as this ad and this one.
I’ll drink to that!
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