Droga5 Creatives Talk No Bollocks for Newcastle

Droga5 agency creatives, Dan Kenneally (pictured, left) and Ryan Raab (right), captured the imagination of consumers last year, with an original campaign for their Newcastle Brown Ale client that managed to gain as much attention as the Game Day spots, but without actually making an ad or airing it at the spectacle.

Drafting in the talent of American actress and singer, Anna Kendrick, a behind-the-scenes style film included details about what the Mega Huge Football Game Ad would have included, if it had been made.

The campaign went down a treat and this year, the creatives were tasked with following up the feat. Releasing two spots, Chores, which you can read more about here, followed by Band of Brands, which saw the agency enlist 37 other brands to make a spot this time around, the work again takes a No Bollocks approach to advertising for the beer client.

Below, the duo discusses this year’s challenge and why this type of original marketing works for Newcastle Brown Ale.

How much of a challenge was it to return with another unique campaign this year?

The brief both years was to get as much attention as a real Big Game ad without having an ad in the Big Game, which is a pretty clear but daunting brief. I guess the biggest challenge was to not fall into the trap of most sequels and just repeat last year’s campaign. We went through a lot of concepts and put a lot of stuff on the table. But Band of Brands stood out as another way to poke fun at the bollocks of big game ads while simultaneously mocking and tapping into the sharing economy. Chores was a great opportunity to draft off of a contest that was already a big part of the conversation and to poke fun at crowd sourcing, which is another bit of bollocks as well.

Then came the call for Band of Brands. Tell us about that…

We sent out a video with an email address and a disclaimer that most brands might not hear back from us and the offers came flooding in. I think we had about 350 brands in four days and they really ranged from large national brands to local barbershops or personal lines of yoga clothes; it was a pretty big range. It was pretty great. For a minute, we were worried. Should we have a back-up plan just in case we get zero responses? But it all worked out.

How did you manage to whittle it down to 37 from 350?

A lot of that was just how many brands we could approve in time. But we tried to choose a nice mix of national, local, and just novel and bizarre. Some just had great names; how do you not include the Detroit Beer Collective?

Did you have the script and scene for the spot set before everyone was involved?

Yes. Being Newcastle, we always want to do innovative things in a fun, self-aware way.  So we had a placeholder script, and the basic concept always involved two actors desperately trying to badly string 30 pitches into one coherent narrative in an increasingly rushed, desperate way. One of the most challenging parts of the process involved revising that script over and over to accommodate all the brands, working in feedback from 30 brand managers, and maintaining some kind of structure that made some sense. It was like a fun puzzle.

It seems like a fun account to work on…

Absolutely. What are interesting about it is the assignments themselves; they can be insanely ambitious. When we got the Super Bowl brief last year it was such an intimidating thing. We thought it’d be impossible to get noticed without having an ad at the event. So we just really appreciate working on a brand that brings those problems to us. They’re really collaborative clients; we have the same sense of humor and they make it really easy to work with because we have the same goals in mind. And they understand that this content needs to compete with everything else on the Internet, and needs to be just as fresh, funny, and edgy. 

And tell us about your thoughts on the Super Bowl advertising in general over the past year or two. Have you seen any trends and will they continue?

The Super Bowl is absolutely the most saturated week in advertising, but it’s also the one week people are paying attention to and actively seeking out marketing, and we’ve used that to our advantage.  We’ve found that as long as you’ve got a compelling story and your own angle on it people will tune in. Your campaign doesn’t need to be on the game to get the Big Game attention.

Do you think it’s easier to create a piece of work for a beer or potato chip rather than a car at the Super Bowl?

I think it’s hard no matter what you work on. We’ve worked on a range of clients, and every client comes with their own problems to solve which need to be tackled in their own way. We’re always looking for creative situations and problems like that.

I think that because Newcastle is such an ambitious brief, we’re afforded some freedom that we’re not allowed on some other projects because in order to get that attention of the consumers at such a crowded time you have to take things a little bit further.