Abstract

Newcastle Brown Ale was a beer brand owned by Heineken, a Dutch brewing company. Newcastle made its effort to enter the Super Bowl campaign 2014, a highly popular sporting event held every year in the US. The Super Bowl enjoyed a large viewership and ratings among television programs, so advertisers wanted to showcase their brands during this event. However, the cost of buying air time during the event was around 4.5 million dollars for a 30-second slot according to Newcastle, it could not afford. Moreover, rival beer giant Anheuser-Busch had locked up the ad time as the exclusive beer advertiser for the event. However, Newcastle leveraged social media and crowdfunded a regional ad during the 2015 Super Bowl to creatively showcase its brand during the event. This project was called ‘Band of Brands’ where companies could contribute for one 60-second ad slot in which all of them would be included along with Newcastle. In 2014 too, Newcastle had uploaded videos in Ifwemadeit.com which raised the curiosity of the viewers regarding what strategy it would follow in 2015. The ‘Band of Brands’commercial was finally developed and aired featuring 37 brands. The campaign received accolades for its creativity and for using crowdfunding for developing the ad, but others raised questions on Newcastle’s ambush marketing ploy and also questioned whether other brands had really benefitted from this commercial as their appearance in it was so brief that a viewer could not even get a proper glimpse of them.

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the issues and challenges in creativity in advertising and how Newcastle employed crowdfunding for creating an ad.
• Understand the issues and challenges in sponsoring events and event-related advertising.
• Understand the concept of ambush marketing.
• Analyze the crowdfunding strategy execution by Newcastle Brown Ale.
• Discuss and debate the pros and cons of being an official sponsor of an event in the light of campaigns such as ‘Band of Brands’

Keywords

Creativity in advertising,Creative ad campaign,Super Bowl Campaign, Crowdfunding, Crowdfunding strategy, Ambush marketing, Social media marketing, Viral marketing, Newcastle Brown Ale, ‘Band of Brands’ Campaign