Alcohol. Everyone’s favorite social lubricant and party juice. With a reputation for fun, alcohol seems like one of those things that doesn’t need a PR campaign. After all, it’s already pretty popular. But the sheer number of brands and types out there make it one of the most competitive markets. The best alcohol PR campaigns are those that stick in the minds of consumers and reveal something unique about the product.
Here are some of the best long standing Public Relations Campaigns for an alcohol brand:
Maes
Maes is the second most popular beer in Belgium. Maes also happens to be the third most common last name in the country, so the company decided to recruit every family member in the country to their side. How did they do this? They offered a free barrel of beer to everyone with the name Maes on the condition they share their barrel with 20 friends.
Every Maes family got a code they could register on the Facebook page, scheduling a date and a local bar to have their party. But Maes didn’t stop there. They adopted people into the family too. Allowing Belgian followers to change their last name on their Facebook account for a day and register for their own party with a free barrel of beer.
For a few days at least, Maes became the most common last name in the country. In just six weeks, they got 500,000 new followers on their FB page, and 75,000 in just one of those days. Yep, that’s was a pretty good PR move.
Heineken equipped their bottles with LED lights. Sound and motion trackers make the lights turn on when someone picks up the bottle or in response to the beat at a club. The lights activate at different speeds, so you get waves of light when there’s a group of unopened bottles together and activated by sound.
Heineken knows how to set the party mood and add just enough sparkle in the flashing bottles creating a special glow to everything nearby.
This vodka brand from Holland has limited edition bottles that feature a scrolling LED ticker. The ticker comes pre-programmed with six common gifting sayings – Happy Birthday, Happy Anniversary, Congratulations, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I Love You.
But if you want to make a unique message, it is easily programmed with personal messages and is a really cool step up from personally engraved wine bottles. Even cooler than that, the LED panel can be bought in several different color options.
In Brazil, Budweiser has come up with a unique way to toast. The Buddy Cup (or you might call it the Bud e-cup) looks like a regular plastic beer cup, but it allows people to “friend” each other on Facebook just by tapping the cups together.
So you could go home with hundreds of new friends on your Facebook account after just one party. The only caveat, make sure you’re not too much in your cups that your cup’s not bumping with someone you don’t want on your Facebook account.
Cerveza Salta Beer targeted regions in Australia and New Zealand where people love their rugby and their beer. To get fans fired up, they created tackle vending machines and placed them in bars throughout the region. To get your beer, you put in the money, and then you smash as hard as you can into the side of the machine to see if you qualify for the beer.
Kind of like the hammer and bell strongman event at a carnival, you have to hit it hard enough to get into the green light section releasing the beer. Of course, if you hit that machine hard a few times, you may be icing up your shoulder with that cold beer.
Antarctica Beer
Carnival in Rio has more than 2 million people attending every year and is one of the largest celebrations in the world. You can imagine what it’s like getting home after a night partying with that many people. Antarctica Beer wanted to do their part for safety, for recycling, and for making sure people got home. So they came up with a brilliant idea.
During Carnival, all you have to do is run the bar code on an empty Antarctica Beer over the reader on the turnstiles for the train station. You get your ticket free, leave your cans for recycling, and no one has to worry about being on the road with a bunch of partygoers. Pure genius!
Polar Beer in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil faced a dilemma. There are two very popular rival soccer teams in the area, so Polar devised a plan to support both and win with the fans at the same time. PB created a microsite and funded it with $100,000. The site ran for one month, during which time, fans could visit and earn $1 for their team.
Of course, the money could be stolen with a visit from a fan of the opposing team. The site turned a rivalry between two soccer teams into a game that fans could play. By the time a month was up, Polar Beer had successfully engaged with both sides of the rivalry.
The site got more than a million page views from nearly 100,000 unique viewers. Not bad work for 30 days.
Stella Artois Cidre
During the summer of 2013, Stella Artois (hard) Cidre created a unique advertising campaign based on the weather outside. The idea for this campaign came after studying the previous 12 years and consumption patterns.
Findings showed buying went up when the temperature did too.
So they created an automated system to run adds for the Cidre when temperatures rose for particular areas by 2 degrees above the national average.
The ads showed on LD6 and Transvision screens as LivePosters in public locations near where consumers could purchase the Cidre.
The creativity of these alcohol Public Relations campaigns grabs attention for their brands. Experiences like that create relationships between customers and brands.
These alcohol Public Relations campaigns are creative and unique. Most importantly, they got attention for their respective brands.
By using interesting devices such as tackle machines and turnstiles or creative technical gadgets like LED lights or social media, these campaigns succeeded in bringing attention to these alcohol brands and getting people interested.