“Carlsberg tastes like the rancid p*ss of Satan.“
The above may not seem to be the best thing for the Carlsberg UK team to be promoting on Twitter, yet this ‘Mean Tweets’ campaign from 16over90 rightly won the PR category at the The Drum Marketing Awards Europe 2020.
A disruptive, strategic project, it led on spinning the negative – sometimes offensive – tweets about the brand, in a multi-stage, engaging content marketing campaign, comprising paid social, intrigue and video.
The background
Carlsberg had lost its way. The proud Danish brewer (UK brewing in Northampton) had become one of the pack – nothing standout about it in terms of quality, or point of difference. It was no longer ‘Probably the best beer in the world’ – a great piece of copywriting, in my opinion. [Check out the background to that brilliant slogan here.]
So, the Carlsberg marketing team partnered with 16over90, who were supported by Fold7 and Initiative to deliver the creative.
Subtly-promoted tweets
Firstly, they took negative tweets from past years and subtly promoted them across Twitter. This got picked up by a number of trade mags including The Drum – ‘Why is Carlsberg promoting tweets branding its beer the 'rancid piss of Satan'?’
Collated negative tweets promoted by CarlsbergUK (c/o The Drum)
What next?
After stirring up curiosity and online discussions, creating awareness, the next step was to bring the tweets to life.
Taking a range of real Carlsberg UK colleagues from across the company – including senior directors, finance and marketing, delivery drivers, brewers, call centre teams and more – these employees were filmed speaking directly to the camera, reading out the tweets and giving their opinions. It appears that they have genuinely not read them before by their apparent honest reactions (see below)!
This was then followed up with a second video of more employees from across the business reading out relatively offensive and – at best – not positive tweets about their eponymous product. The product that pays their wages, the brand that is above the door as they come to work. Very funny, and bringing the people who are Carlsberg to the fore. Taking the conversation out of the Twitter echo chamber worked well.
This was followed up with out of home (OOH) advertising, driving discussion about Carlsberg not being the best beer. These clever 48-sheets (see right) and digital advertising screens at key areas around the country helped develop the conversation with the overarching strategy for Carlsberg’s new positioning.
There are (almost) no new ideas
Quick one on creative ideas. There are very rarely completely new ones.
The skill comes from taking insight, innovative ideas and things that previously have worked, and tweaking them to reach your specific objectives.
Others have undertaken similar approaches, with KFC promoting negative tweets to relaunch their ‘crap’ fries in 2018, and American chat show host Jimmy Kimmel has got celebrities to read out mean tweets about themselves since at least as 2016.
However, what the Carlsberg UK ‘Mean Tweets’ campaign did was bring together different elements to meet the objective of the client – to create awareness through controversial online discussion curiosity, to create conversation, backed up with human, authentic (!) video responses from real colleagues, and drive intrigue ahead of a massive new brand marketing relaunch around quality.
In my opinion, this is a brilliant adaptation/extension of the negative tweet formula to emphasise a strategic move from the company to acknowledge that in the past their beer was not the best quality.
What do you think?
Clever or basic? Let me know below. Read more about the campaign from The Drum here.
Get in touch if you have any other ideas of campaigns that have impressed or surprised you and I'll take a look. Or if you would like to write something for my blog, maybe looking at a campaign that impressed you, please let me know.
See other campaigns I’ve covered here: