Hasta La Creative!

After a quick attempt at entering Doritos’ “Crash The Super Bowl” competition, Droga5 began enlisting brands for Newcastle’s “Band of Brands” crowdsourced Super Bowl ad campaign, with help from Aubrey Plaza. Now, around a week after the last teaser with Plaza, the brand has revealed Droga5’s big game ad, featuring 37 different brands. The 60-second spot will run regionally in only one market: Palm Springs, California. But, like last year’s campaign, it’s sure to attract its share of attention online.

As you might expect, “Band of Brands” is a whirlwind of brand placement and big market advertising parody. Opening, appropriately enough, with a couple opening up some bottles of Newcastle, the ad manages to name drop Match and Armstrong Flooring in the first ten seconds. The pace only picks up from there as the ad gets more over-the-top and self-effacing about its brand references. At one point, the man looks at his watch and runs upstairs to pitch Charisma bedding, passing by a host of signs for other brands along the way. While the ad is basically the one joke we’ve been expecting from “Band of Brands” all along, it handles it entertainingly enough and the ad fits in well with the tone of the brand’s previous campaigns — even if it doesn’t have the staying power of last year’s “If We Made It.”

“Not only did we create the world’s first crowdfunded Big Game ad, but I’m pretty sure we just made the cheapest Big Game ad ever,” said Priscilla Flores Dohnert, brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale, in a statement. “By asking other brands to team up with our brand we are making a statement that Big Game advertising should be accessible to everyone, whether they can afford it or not.”

So, this is why Newcastle Brown Ale hired Aubrey Plaza as its 2015 Super Bowl endorser: Her perma-sarcasm and lack of energy make her the world’s worst spokeswoman—or if you like, the world’s best anti-spokeswoman.

The brewer and ad agency Droga5—who specialize in deflating marketing’s overblown self-importance—continue their march toward the industy’s most overblown, self-important night by having the Parks and Recreation actress sullenly and amusingly milk a cow. This part of the brand’s email to us sums up the approach pretty well:

You can’t make an overblown Big Game ad campaign without releasing a semi-controversial clickbait video ahead of time to prime the pump and get people “excited” about the coming advertisement. (As excited as Aubrey, even.)

Newcastle is actually buying a regional Super Bowl spot this year. In an earlier video with Plaza, it announced a plan to crowdfund that spot with a bunch of other brands.

“In exchange for a small contribution, any brand can join Newcastle’s team and have its logo and messaging featured in an actual Big Game spot,” the brand says. Today is the last day for interested companies to submit their “Band of Brands” proposal for consideration at NewcastleBandOfBrands.com.

“At first we tried to sneak our way into the Big Game by entering a popular commercial contest put on by a certain snack chip brand, but that didn’t work out for us. Now we’re trying to leverage ‘strength in numbers’ to see what that does for us,” said Priscilla Flores Dohnert, brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale.

“Everyone loves a great underdog story. What’s more ‘underdog’ than being short on cash and not having the right to advertise during the game?”

You might remember Newcastle Brown Ale’s antics around last year’s Super Bowl—a little stunt from Droga5 called “If We Made It” that imagined what a Newcastle Super Bowl ad might have looked like if they could have afforded one.

The whole thing went pretty well, to say the least.

Given that success, Newcastle obviously had to screw with this year’s game, too. And so it begins its 2015 Super Bowl ambush with the video below—in which the brewer, which still doesn’t have $4 million lying around, pretends to crash a certain “Crash the Super Bowl” contest by a certain unnamed snack maker (OK, Doritos), so that it can get on the Super Bowl for free.

Newcastle’s fake Doritos ad, also made by Droga5, is amusingly bad—which frankly is a step up from some of the actual Doritos finalists, which are short on the amusing part. It’s full of stupidly obvious Newcastle product placement, in keeping with the brand’s ethos of undercutting typical marketing tactics. There’s even a case study (see below) about the “failed attempt to infiltrate a snack chip contest.”

“We had such a good time almost making that Huge Sports Match ad last year, we decided we’d stop at nothing to finally make our way into the Really Large American Football Contest in 2015. Even if we still can’t afford it,” the brand tells us.

It’s a bit of a convoluted premise—Newcastle’s meta anti-advertising stunts often have a kind of pretzel-like structure to them. But the brand confirms there’s more silliness to come in the next few weeks, so it should be fun to see what else they have in store.

CREDITS
Client: Newcastle Brown Ale
Campaign: Newcastle: Chores. A beer ad disguised as a snack chip ad.
Title: Chores

Agency: Droga5 NY
Creative Chairman: David Droga
Chief Creative Officer: Ted Royer
Group Creative Director: Scott Bell
Senior Art Director: Dan Kenneally
Senior Copywriter: Ryan Raab
Chief Creation Officer: Sally-Ann Dale
Head of Broadcast Production: Ben Davies
Senior Broadcast Producer: David Cardinali
Broadcast Producer: Bill Berg
Global Chief Strategy Officer: Jonny Bauer
Head of Strategy: Chet Gulland
Strategist: Nick Maschmeyer 
Social Strategist: Rebecca Russell 
Communications Strategist: Kevin Wang  
Group Account Director: Dan Gonda
Account Director: Nadia Malik
Account Manager: Ashton Atlas

Client: Heineken USA, Newcastle Brown Ale
Senior Director, Portfolio Brands: Charles Van Es
Brand Director: Priscilla Dohnert
Brand Manager: Brett Steen

Production Company: Droga5 Studios | Film
Director: Mike Long
Line Producer: Jessica Bermingham
DP: Brian Lannin

Editorial: Droga5 AV
Editor: Joseph Schulhoff

On Monday, we posted Miller Lite’s new national TV spot, featuring a handful of fan photos selected from some 180,000 gathered through the immensely successful #ItsMillerTime hashtag campaign.

Now, with impeccable timing, Newcastle is here to call bollocks on the whole idea.

The British brewer, known for its anti-marketing marketing, just launched its own hashtag campaign, #NewcastleAdAid, in which it’s also asking for fan snapshots—and promises to use the wonders of Photoshop to turn them into really shoddy-looking ads.

Why the sudden embrace of low-cost user-generated content? Because it blew its marketing budget on celebs for the Super Bowl and the Fourth of July.

“Newcastle recognized it needed more ‘engaging social content’ to keep all of its new followers interested, but this lazy branded content wasn’t going to make itself,” the brand tells AdFreak. “Newcastle definitely is not the first brand to ask fans to post photos on social media to ‘build a stronger community’ and whatnot, but Newcastle definitely is the best at turning those photos into into obvious, exaggerated, poorly executed ads.”

Here’s the pitch video from Droga5, running on Twitter and Facebook:

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Newcastle Brown Ale had a big hit with its “If We Made It” ambush campaign around the Super Bowl. Now, the British brewer has done something similar for July 4.

The new campaign, from Droga5, is called “If We Won,” and it imagines what America would be like if Britain had won the Revolutionary War. It also continues the tradition, begun last year, of celebrating July 3 as Independence Eve—so the Brits can sneak in with their bangers and mash ahead of Independence Day on July 4.

It’s all a bunch of bollocks, of course—or rather, no bollocks.

Stephen Merchant kicks things off with the amusing video below. Elizabeth Hurley and Zachary Quinto will join the campaign with their own videos in the coming days. There will be 16 pieces of filmed content in all, “to help Newcastle celebrate the land that nearly became ‘Great Britain 2,’ ” the brewer says.

“It’s not easy to sell a British beer during a supremely American holiday, so we’re imagining how great America could have been—and how much beer we could have sold—if the Brits had won the Revolutionary War,” says Quinn Kilbury, brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale, who spoke to Adweek earlier this month about the brand’s Facebook advertising.

“In the late 1700s, colonial Americans risked life and limb to fight for their freedom. Today, we’re running the very real risk of people totally not getting the joke here, and we think that’s pretty patriotic.”

Newcastle Brown Ale, which didn't buy airtime in Sunday's Super Bowl but is doing a wonderfully silly campaign about how it almost did, rolled out more content from Droga5 this week—including the hilarious endorsement below by Anna Kendrick.

Just like last week's Newcastle trailer was the year's best Super Bowl teaser, Kendrick's performance will surely be the funniest among this year's celebs.

Newcastle has done a lot of great stuff around this faux Super Bowl campaign, including a brilliantly self-mocking native ad on Gawker as well as bogus focus-group videos and another endorsement video starring Keyshawn Johnson.

"It seemed like the obvious thing we had to do, and unfair to the world if we didn't," Newcastle brand director Quinn Kilbury said of the Super Bowl ambush. "The Super Bowl is great. The game is amazing, everyone loves the game. But it's become much more about marketing in some ways, and the over-the-top ridiculousness that surrounds it. I saw a lot of that when I was doing the real Super Bowl marketing stuff over at Pepsi, so it's close to my heart, and it is a little ridiculous sometimes. For a brand that likes to poke fun at marketing, we had to poke fun at Super Bowl marketing at some point."

He added: "The brief to Droga5 was, essentially, hijack the conversation around Super Bowl marketing. We had a couple of ideas, but essentially that was it. At first I think we saw doing something around the game itself, but then we thought if you're going to do the Super Bowl, or the Super [Bleep], as we're calling it, you have to be true to the whole marketing show. You have to treat the commercial like it's a $100 million blockbuster."

See the rest of the content below.

God bless Newcastle Brown Ale. As much as we all enjoy advertising when it's good, so much of it—as Newcastle would say—is bollocks. The British brewer (with help from Droga5) has always excelled at skewering irritatingly transparent marketing tactics, and now it sets its sights on the Big Kahuna itself—the Super Bowl.

The faux teasers below launch an "If We Made It" campaign, celebrating the Super Bowl commercial the brewer would have made—if it had been able to afford one. The deadpan copy is spot on, and as ambush marketing goes, the whole campaign is hilariously done as it takes down the overblown process of Super Bowl ad rollouts.

Gird your loins for more content to roll out into the middle of next week.

British brands, understandably, don't have much to say around the Fourth of July—until now. Newcastle Brown Ale, among the cheekiest of U.K. marketers, has turned America's most patriotic holiday to its advantage by inventing a new, completely made-up holiday: Independence Eve on July 3. The idea of the tongue-in-cheek campaign, created by Droga5, is to "honor all things British that Americans gave up when they signed the Declaration of Independence," Newcastle says.

To mark the new holiday, the brewer is introducing the "Revolutionary Koozie," which will be handed out at bars around the country this evening. It features the British flag on one side and the American flag on the other. At the stroke of midnight, you're encouraged to turn your beer 180 degrees and go "from honorary British subject to proud American with the twist of a fist." The campaign extends to digital with a transformation of the brand's Facebook page and a series of daily GIFs highlighting the differences "between British America and American America."

"Newcastle is a very British beer, and needless to say, it doesn't sell that well on July 4. So why not establish it as the beer you drink on July 3?" says Charles van Es, senior director of marketing for Heineken USA portfolio brands. "Unlike the Redcoats in the 18th century, we're picking our battles a little more wisely. By celebrating Independence Eve, we're taking liberties with America's liberty to create a new drinking occasion and ensuring freedom on July 4 tastes sweeter than ever."

Van Es adds: "Like Cinco de Mayo or Thanksgiving Wednesday, Independence Eve is just another excuse to enjoy good times with good friends, but now with a new purpose. On July 3, we're lifting a Newcastle to our British heritage and the American freedom we all appreciate."