Newcastle Brown Ale tried but failed to sneak an ad into this year’s Super Bowl after entering a thinly disguised spot for its beer into Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl user-generated ad competition.
The irreverent beer brand has posted the deliberately clunky ad online after it failed to make the grade for Doritos’ Crash the Super Bowl shortlist.
The 40-second “(un)official snack chip contest submission” by Droga5 is called “Chores” and features a deliberately labored narrative. It opens with a bearded protagonist rooting through a kitchen cupboard and shouting out to his wife, “Have you seen my [bleep bleep] chips?”
“Try cleaning the fridge,” she suggests. The fridge, it transpires, is stuffed full of bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale. He tries the basement, garage, and even under the sink, but alas no nachos or tortilla chips, just more bottles of brown beer and some far-from-surreptitious Newcastle branding.
The ad ends with the line: “The Newcastle Brown Ale of Snack Crisps.”
If you’re as confused as we were by the convoluted meta ad, then an explanation of sorts is on YouTube, where Newcastle Brown explains its strategy and how it could not afford the $4 million price tag to advertise during the Super Bowl.
“So when a certain snack-chip brand offered to air one lucky fan’s big game ad for free,” the voiceover explains, “we made a Newcastle ad perfectly disguised as a user-generated snack chip ad.”
The making-of film goes on to deconstruct Chore, pointing out the bad direction typical of a user-generated spot, highlighting Newcastle Brown Ale’s product placement, and explaining how the spot ends “with a joke that combines broad comedy with mild chauvinism big game viewers will love.”
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