Molson is promoting Carling with an Ontario campaign that takes a humourous look at great beer thinking. The campaign includes print, radio, OOH, a website and contest, as well as inserts in packs of the beer. The creative was developed by TAXI and highlights the value of the brand. ‘Our strategy was simple,’ Aaron Bilyea, brand manager, value and regional portfolio at Molson tells MiC. ‘Why make a guy feel cheap when you can make him feel smart,’ he says. ‘Carling wasn’t brewed to be cheap – it was brewed to be great. This meant we could position Carling as a truly great beer decision.’
Darren Clarke, ECD at TAXI, adds that while value played an important role in the campaign they also wanted to highlight the brand’s history. ‘We wanted to add some dimension to value because that whole category is predicated on price. We wanted to add a differentiator in there that states that Carling is one of the few if not the only value brand that’s been around since 1840.’
The campaign is targeting males in their late twenties to late thirties in blue collar cities in Ontario, including Hamilton, Windsor, Sarnia, St. Catharines and London, ‘because that’s where our target lives,’ says Bilyea, adding that there’s a heavier presence in Hamilton due to Carling’s sponsorship of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
With Mediaedge:cia handling buys for the campaing, radio ads run until the week of Sept. 21 in Windsor, St. Catharines, Hamilton, London and Sarnia, and in Toronto and Ottawa though September 7.
The print portion of the campaign is appearing in dailies and weeklies in Kitchener, Niagara Falls, Barrie, Hamilton, Sudbury, Windsor, Sarnia, Brampton, Woodstock and Cambridge through Oct. 26, while the OOH portion of the campaign runs through Aug. 31.
A web component is also part of the campaign and features a site with videos developed, also by TAXI featuring great beer thinking, like the idea to give friends a beer for helping you move, and the invention of the beer helmet. The site comes with a contest where visitors are invited to share their great beer decisions for the chance to win an ATV. Consumers are directed to the site via in-case postcards.
