Notorious Beam Team

 Beck’s has launched a multi dimensional campaign called “Music Inspired Art” that is intended to give consumers an emotional reason to actively choose Beck’s over other bottled lagers and command a price premium. In particular they are focusing their attention on the hipster crowd with the hope that this will have positive knock on benefits for those that look on.

They have a long association with art and music, having sponsored the Beck’s Futures modern art prize as well as designing limited edition bottles with up artists such as Damien Hirst and Dino Chapman.

This year they’ve stepped things up a level with their “Music Inspired Art” campaign.


This started with a competition on Flickr to “re-imagine” the album covers of the top 100 albums of all time.



It then moved into a collaboration with Hard-Fi and Ladyhawke who have created bottle artwork that is inspired by their music.



This mashed-up, lo-fi content has then been amplified into a 360 idea. It has been used in outdoor, print and taxi media, PR’ed widely on websites like Fused, Bitch Buzz, Virgin Music Shout, Holy Moly and merchandised on 16 million bottles. One person loved the poster so much they have pasted it up on their wall.



In addition they have used the exteriors of their flagship London pubs as canvases to promote their association with edgy rock bands. This has been picked up by Trendhunter Magazine.



They also invited urban influencers in the music scene to secret gigs which you can enjoy in the video below



Beck’s have also claimed a media first. Their interactive bus shelters allow passers by to plug in their iPods and see a graphical visualisation of the music they are listening to which is then shared on Flickr.

Ken Valledy, Beck's Brand Director at InBev UK, said "This is a great way to get beer drinkers to plug into Beck's and interact on a whole new level with the UK's No. 1 imported lager. This fresh plug-and-play advertising initiative is about interacting with beer drinkers on their terms... this interactive media activity really helps to bring the campaign to life.”

Whilst it seems only 400 people have used the service, it has generated plenty of PR. You can see how it works by watching the video below from Electrolyte.


Becks interactive music installations - 002 from electro on Vimeo.

And the slideshow showcasing the bottle labels from the Flickr stream is below:



This is an impressive campaign that knits together very well. But it's not perfect. Many people have dismissed the interactive bus stops as "just buzz" and the collaboration with Hard-Fi has been far less popular than with Ladyhawke. We Heart Stuff refused to feature Hard-Fi in their article and on the Drowned in Sound forum Hard-Fi were slated, the secret gigs were scorned and the artwork was rubbished. On Twitter someone wondered, "Does Hard-Fi Becks taste as bad as Hard-Fi sound?" And on Nick Burcher's post about Beck's one commenter said that they would stop drinking Beck's because of their association with Hard-Fi.

Overall the campaign successfully cements Beck’s longstanding association with music and art in a way that's refreshing, worth talking about and ambitious.

Exclusif party on Flickr

Via Adverlab:

"If you want your share of consumer-generated content (buzz! buzz!), then you have to give people the right tools and the right incentives (and talk to the guys at MIT C3). Nikon sent out a bunch of new D80 cameras around and asked people to take pictures. Then Nikon collected the pictures and put together an ad that appears this week in Business Week. Besides, check out the "stunning gallery" photoset on Flickr."

90,000 photos can't be wrong!

If you're going down this route, don't get into the bother that Virgin have got themselves into in Australia.

From drp on Flickr:

I saw this and was amazed. It's not that I haven't seen chatter about brands on Flickr before. It's not the first time I've seen beautiful bottle shots being chatted about on Flickr before.

But it is the first time I've seen people getting genuinely excited about a brand on Flickr in such a way as to develop a cultish following. People love pictures and people love stories. It connects with something deep inside ourselves.

Here's what drp's text said:

"In May of 2005, Maker's Mark celebrated its 47th year of putting its whisky into bottles for sale. When T. William Samuels created Maker's Mark he was already bucking a downward trend in the bourbon industry. Why would any sane entrepreneur build into an industry where there was already excess capacity and the trend was going the wrong direction?

Samuels' conviction was that there was a hidden, unserved market for a different kind of bourbon than was on the market in the 1950s. He saw a market for an elegant whisky. There was, in his thinking, a customer who was not buying bourbon because the bourbons on the market in the 1950s lacked refinement. Instead of the relatively heavy, harsh, minimally aged bourbons so common in the post-Prohibition and post World War II era, Samuels sought to create a more refined, clean, smooth, delicate whisky. After all, why couldn't a native American bourbon be just as elegant as some French brandy? Samuels saw no reason why there could not be such a whisky.

So, he experimented with a variety of formulations and distilling apparati. From the Old Fitzgerald distillery in Louisville he learned how a mash bill that replaced the traditional rye with wheat could produce a whisky that was still full on the palate, but which lacked the coarseness that a heavy dose of rye would add. Although he dabbled with an old copper pot still as part of the process, he chose to go with a traditional copper column still.

And so that the public would understand that this whisky was meant to be elegant, Samuels (with the advice of his wife) settled on the distinctive Maker's Mark shaped bottled dipped in the trade-mark red wax.

Samuels seems to have been right. Not wanting to be a flash in the pan, Maker's Mark has focused on steady, sustainable growth. Without becoming trendy, it has grown every single year of its existence. Indeed, it has now grown to the point where Maker's Mark worries that it will not have sufficient bourbon to satisfy its market."

And here are some of the many comments he got:

"some friends visited the distellery once and brought us back a bottle that they had dipped in the wax themselves

Interesting. I didn't know this story. Cool shot too.

When I want to order something cool and classic, I get a Maker's Mark on the rocks. No frou-frou drinks for this girl!

sealed with wax. vibrant red wax. just elegant. as usual, a great picture.

My drink of choice, I had the "gold" the other day - amazing.

GREEAAAAT macro... that bright red color of the seal is incredible...

and your story, as ever, is very good and good teaching! THANKS!

Oh yeah... a Maker's on the rocks, please. Nice shot, Duane! Cheers.

Looks so real--but could not pry it loose from my screen.
Just last week I convinced my old man to try this (I liked the bottle, my method of shopping) and now we're hooked.
I don't even drink and yet this floats gladly on the tongue--
Just proves my old axiom: when ANYthing edible is made correctly, it's good.

This is a wonderful photo of a wonderful bourbon. (Consider adding Knob Creek to your collection as well. :)

Ahhh... my favorite. The Champagne of Bourbons...

Beautiful shot! I love how sexy the red sealing wax is.

This is so neat - a great story, but an even better photo. If I could drink, I'd want to try this just because of the way you've captured the bottle. :-)

Wow! I'm not a whiskey fan myself, but my guy loves it; single malt from the Scottish isles by preference although we tend to have a bottle of bourbon in the house as well.

I don't think he's ever tried Maker's Mark but I'm going to get him a bottle ;)"

I find it amazing how much love there is for this brand. It distills down to three things:
1. Great product.
2. Great story.
3. Great bottle.

This Flickr page is awash with insights ripe for gathering as you can track the people who are enthusiastic about it. Moreover, you can see that this post has lead not only to buzz, but also directly to sales. Stunning.

The Innocent Pinboard from Where's the Sausage:

"God these guys are good. They do help me keep the faith in branding on my darker days.

Despite becoming seriously big (100 million Euros+ in turnover), innocent manage to stay, well, innnocent. One really nice feature is there brand pinboard.

Rather than this being a static and brand-created piece of content, it updates daily using a feed from the brand's flicker albums, which are populated mainly with user-generated photos. My favourite is the "supergran" album, full of photos of the woolly hats they put on the bottles at Xmas to raise money for charity. Why Supergran? Becuase the little hats are made by an army of little old ladies who live in old peoples' homes!

Any other brands making good use of user-generated content like this?"

This is fantastic - a cracking example of how a brand can successfully embrace web 2.0 and encourage brand enthusiasm. I couldn't like this a lot more!

Below is the Flickr group that powers the Sueprgran part of the pinboard:



This model could be a great way of facilitating the DisCCover campaign.

Click here for the complete Innocent Flcikr account.

From Lynette Webb at Isobar via Fallon Blog:



"User generated content, grassroots media, whatever you want to call it, had a huge impact in 2006. YouTube came from nowhere to end the year as one of the pre-eminent entertainment sites online and a fascinating window into the bizarreness of daily life. Blogging continued to diversify and there was a rise in ‘serious’ professional blogs. Uploading photos became standard practice, as a means of sharing and storage, and some led by Flickr even forged new forms of online community...

Points for marketers:

Classic content providers are increasingly talent-spotting in user-generated content sites. Advertisers and their agencies should do the same. Not only can it spark ideas, it can also lead to some interesting collaborations.

Don’t don’t don’t be tempted to launch a flog aka a fake blog for your product. You’ll get found out eventually and any short term benefit will be obliterated by the fallout. As my colleague Gary put it “Why, oh why are people still launching fake blogs? Who doesn't realized by now that this is a bad idea? It's like the headline is "Man surprised that hitting self in the head with hammer hurts, causes bruise".

Think of sites like YouTube as being a new genre of TV channel, but with different rules for success. Be creative in how you seek to use them and don’t be afraid to experiment.

Be a good sport if someone creates a send-up of your ad, or does something creative with your product (so long as it’s not hurting anyone). It means they’re talking about you and even if it’s not what you’d ideally want them to say, it’s better than not being noticed at all. Getting huffy and responding with a “big company corporate” response is only going to prolong & worsen the problem. (Learn from Coke-Mentos)."

For the full text click here.