Poetry in Promotion

MARKETING CAMPAIGNS 2005:  We select the 10 campaigns that elevated promotional activity to an art form in 2005 + the best of the rest. Penny Boothman reports

  It may not be particularly scientific, and we may not have invited applications or engaged a panel of high-calibre judges to award the prizes, but we at db felt that there were a few marketing campaigns this year that we just couldn’t let slip by unrewarded. It would be fair to say that we hear about pretty much everything the crazy marketing execs of the drinks trade are up to throughout the year, but these are some of the launches, events, initiatives and sponsorship deals that have particularly amused, astonished and impressed.
  As usual, the ability to make us laugh won as much favour as improved financial results or increased product visibility. It’s a fickle world and creating a campaign for your brand that still has people talking at the end of the year is certainly a feat to be congratulated.
  Of course, it proved impossible to decide on just 10 to congratulate, so we have also come up with a healthy “best of the rest” round-up along with a reminder of a few campaigns that might be best forgotten – and possibly have been already.

WOLF BLASS
Ashes Sponsorship
  Howzat!? Never mind the sampling campaigns, the neck-tags, competitions or print support, for pure “getting yourselves seen on the telly” value, Wolf Blass’s sponsorship of the cricket this year has been an unparalleled success. The Ashes series was chosen as a cost-effective way of creating a national and local sales platform for a large target audience of regular wine drinkers. Apart from the highly visible perimeter signage, the promotion ran in conjunction with the Financial Times and Qantas, featuring consumer competitions to win wine and tickets, and the brand poured more than 2,500 cases in sampling at the grounds. In real terms, the coverage has been estimated to be worth approx £15 million, with in excess of £5m media value received in Australia. Brand awareness rose 25% in three months and purchase intention increased by 35%.

  “This year was the first of our four-year deal, and we are extremely excited about how successful the programme has been for Wolf Blass,” says Melanie Hollick, the assistant brand manager who managed the sponsorship this year. “We were extremely lucky that the Ashes competition was so close and that it captured the attention of so many people in the UK, and globally for that matter. We have started work on next year’s programme and hope that we can continue to deliver such amazing results.”
  It remains to be seen whether the players themselves can also deliver amazing results.

HENDRICK’S GIN
The Most Unusual
  It’s the marketing equivalent of taking off all your clothes and running down the middle of the road. Undoubtedly one of the best ways to get yourself noticed in the drinks trade is to let everyone think you’re stark raving mad. Hendrick’s gin embraced all things bizarre this year, including a steam-powered cocktail shaker, the Teatime martini, a most unusual conversation piece, sponsorship of a hit West End Burlesque show and distribution of its Unusual Times newsletter, not forgetting the Chap Olympiad, as if we could. In all seriousness, sampling events in Waitrose, and Selfridge’s successfully introduced new consumers to Hendrick’s, as did a national G&T campaign with Corney & Barrow wine bars. Trade events included the Annual Hendrick’s Bartender Croquet Competition, presence at the Bar show 2005 and masterclasses in conjunction with Spirit Works.

CAMPARI
Campari & Catwalks
  “Campari linked with fashion has undoubtedly created a positive brand image platform and our primary aim has been to create shock tactics to challenge existing perceptions of Campari and to get the brand on our target consumers’ radar,” explains Karen Crowley, UK brand manager for Campari. The fashion activity this year reached an estimated 10.1 million consumers and involved serving a staggering 30,000 Campari drinks to target consumers with the result that sales are up 9% on last year.

“We recognise that recruiting new consumers to Campari will be a slower and more expensive process than other more accessible spirits like vodka, for example,” says Crowley, before adding, “but we are encouraged by the positive signs we are seeing from the fashion campaign.” The fact that Campari has recently been voted a Cool Brand for the second year in a row proves that it is doing something right.

MUMM
Taste for Discovery
  Champagne Mumm has taken the bull by the horns this year and launched a comprehensive consumer campaign celebrating extraordinary human achievements in sport and exploration. The campaign is all the more laudable as it marks a move away from the deep discounting that has driven Mumm’s sales, if not its value, over recent years. The new Friends of GH Mumm include Patrick Woodhead, whose Invesco team kicked off the activity last December when it became the youngest ever team to reach the South Pole; Ellen McArthur; Tom Avery; Steve Fosset and Bear Grylls.
  The campaign was supported by a packaging redesign and point-of-sale and promotional activity in-store. “Possibly the most exciting thing about the campaign has not been X number of sales or anything like that, it’s been the excitement and good feeling towards the brand that we encountered whenever we had a chance to talk about the story and explain the history,“ explains Anna Adsetts, senior brand manager at Allied Domecq Wine UK. “We’ve only just started to really exploit the story of our past.” George Herman Mumm, apparently, was possessed of a daredevil spirit.

42 BELOW
Viral Campaign
  Marketing? What marketing? The premium vodka category is one of the most hard-fought in the business, so taking a different approach can really pay off. But just what was the inspiration for 42 Below’s e-mail viral campaign? “Budget constraint,” says Geoff Ross, CEO. “There is a great saying by a New Zealander called Ernest Rutherford which is ‘We didn’t have any money so we had to think’. We didn’t have a budget that would stretch to TV or billboards, so we figured that the internet would be our best bet. Plus the internet allows you to be a little more risqué than the traditional mediums.”
  No kidding. 42 Below created an e-mail for the gay community, for example, (“We at 42 Below vodka want you to give us your mighty pink dollar…”) and one for the UK (“Even though the sun doesn’t glow in your sky, we at 42 Below think it shines out your arse…”). At a cost of roughly NZ$9,000 (c.£3,000) for each e-mail, it looks to have been a good investment. “It’s too hard to quantify results,” says Ross, “but we view it most definitely as a success. We noticed an immediate lift in New Zealand. We are now the fourth most visited food and beverage site in New Zealand; up there with the likes of Cadbury and McDonald’s who spend gazillions more than us!” The Story of 42 mpeg is one of three finalists in the first global viral awards.

GROLSCH
Jenneken Barge
  Not all campaigns are aimed just at consumers and next we come to a particularly memorable piece of trade marketing activity. This year, in addition to its concert sponsorship consumer programme, Grolsch kitted out a barge called Jenneken with all its bar-top equipment and invited key customers from the on-trade and retail sector to come aboard. Activity in this floating brand showcase included customer meetings and presentations as well as bar staff and sales force training. With excellent feedback,  the total cost of the initiative of around £160,000 – including the purchase

of the barge – seems to be money well spent.
  Following this highly successful launch, the good ship Jenneken will be starting off on a tour of key cities in 2006 to support another Grolsch initiative called the Grolsch Green Light District. Sadly, no one from Grolsch was available to comment,
but we assume they were pleased.

PERONI
Emporio Peroni
  Perplexed as we were to hear that Peroni had rented a boutique on Sloane Street, this was the move that made us sit up and take notice of its rebranding campaign. “We wanted to communicate our brand in a distinctive and relevant way,” says Chris Taylor, international brands director for Peroni Nastro Azzurro. “It emphasises the Italian world of fashion and style.”
  SABMiller invested £5m into the integrated advertising and PR programme, which was part of a global strategy to reposition Nastro Azzurro as Peroni Nastro Azzurro. Sales have increased by 30% in the UK compared to last year and on-trade distribution has increased by about 40% in the London area.
  “The relaunch gave us confidence that the new direction would do exactly what it was targeted to do; to position Peroni as the latest style icon from Italy and to put back the fizz in a rather flat and dull beer market,” says Jean-Pierre van Lin, marketing director for Miller Brands UK.

MOET
Fashion week
Moët has to be the most fashionable fizz of them all. In fact, the brand started its London Fashion Week sponsorship in 1997, and what better way to get your branding splashed across the glossy magazines and your Champagne into the glasses of the famous and fashionable?

  This year Moët also collaborated with several high-profile fashion designers in creating a range of cocktails to be served at the branded bar in Selfridges. The height of the LFW activity is the Moët & Chandon Fashion Tribute, which was this year awarded to Matthew Williamson who then created a gift box for Moët Rosé.
  “The Moët brand is all about being fabulous and feeling fabulous,” says brand director, Caroline Sutcliffe. “Our marketing programme is designed to make sure that Moët can bring a bit of glamour into the lives of all Champagne drinkers. Whether you’re an A-lister in the front row of the opening show at London Fashion Week sipping on a Mini Moët, or whether you are treating yourself to the limited-edition Moët Rosé Matthew Williamson gift pack, Moët represents the fabulous life.”
  The Fashion Tribute to Williamson gained sustained coverage for eight months, worth over five times the original investment.

MANGERS
Time Dedicated to You
  You thought cider was for hippies and yokels, but serve it from a pint bottle, in a pint glass – over ice – and, hey presto, cider is cool again! This is one launch that took the pub trade by storm this summer. Despite the obvious snags that the ice in the glass dilutes your drink and makes it go flat, and that you can’t fit your whole pint bottle in at once, Magners has been a runaway success.
  It’s been Ireland’s favourite cider for years and was launched in Scotland in 2002, but it was this summer that happy punters all over England were to be seen with chilled glasses of bright orange fizzy alcoholic apple juice in hand.
  “Magners has changed consumer perceptions of cider and has been overwhelmingly well received by the trade, revitalising and expanding the cider category,” says Stephen Kent, marketing manager. The campaign has featured TV, radio, outdoor and press advertising and event sponsorship such as the London Wasps rugby team.

CARLING
The Cold Beer Amnesty
  In an inspired piece of sponsorship and sampling activity Carling decided to help festival-goers out of the one nightmare situation that faces us all: warm beer. Any unhappy camper finding themselves in possession of a tepid four-pack could march it along to the Carling tent and exchange it for four cans of ice-cold Carling. Not only are consumers drinking your product, but they’re loving you for letting them do so. And all for the price of a few cases of beer and a refrigerated lorry.
  “The Carling Beer Amnesty areas at the Carling Weekend: Reading and Leeds Festivals 2005 were a great success. We swapped over 20,000 cans of warm beer for ice-cold cans of Carling, and plan to run this activity again in 2006!” says Tim Hull, Carling sponsorship manager at Coors. Fingers crossed for a good summer then.

BEST OF THE REST
  With so many others that made us laugh along the way (even if they weren’t meant to be funny) another campaign we just couldn’t let slip by was the brazen kitsch of the Lambrini Bikini competition. In this £2m initiative, Lambrini turned “the likes of Blackpool, Rhyl and Southend into palm-tree filled holiday heavens” to stage bikini catwalk contests and on-trade nights where girls were encouraged to get up on stage and show off their tans. And all this supported by a print campaign with the strap Lambrini Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Well, they do say you have to know your target audience…
  Meanwhile, consumers at the other end of the scale were being teased with Penfold’s new en primeur sales initiative. The first Australian wine to market itself in this way, it certainly got tongues wagging (and chequebooks flapping) with icon wine buyers.

  Next we’d like to applaud Glenfiddich for realising that sex sells. Unfortunately for Scotch-drinking porn fans over here, the Playmalt of the Month was available only to Playboy subscribers in Germany, but if there’s one way to get drinkers to sit up and take notice of the rather staid malt whisky category, then this is probably it.
  As sophisticated as we pretend to be, we have to admit that there’s nothing as entertaining as a good old Aussie stereotype. Banrock’s radio advertising (part of a £500,000 summer campaign) with Tony Sharley gave us just that, in a series of quintessentially English – and environmentally conscious – situations.
  Innocent’s Fruitstock weekend event of music, food and relaxation also deserves praise for pure harmless entertainment value. Fun the way
fun should be, and without an abv
in sight.

Campaign Charlies
  We’re not pretending any of this is easy, and there are always a few campaigns each year that sail woefully wide of the mark. More on the miss side than the hit side was the German Wine Institute’s Riesling Short of a Picnic initiative which did, indeed, turn out to be a Riesling short, when they ran out of wine in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
  Another wooden spoon for forgettable activity goes to Loire Valley Wines for its installation of a floral carpet in Trafalgar Square. This may sound like a waste of 95,000 plants, but following the one-day event the flowers were transplanted to Exmouth seafront, where they remained until the end of the summer. Here’s hoping that Loire wine sales in Exmouth are being monitored.
  If it seems cruel of us to single out these few, take heart in the fact that there are sure to be lots of other marketing mis-haps out there, we’ve simply forgotten about them already. As they say,  there’s no such thing as bad press.  db

Any better ideas? Email your nominations for the best and worst campaigns of the year to angeline@thedrinksbusiness.com