Touchdown! Newcastle’s Anti-Ad is a Huge Hit!

Published February 19, 2014 at 7:34 am

Just because your brand doesn’t have the exorbitant amount of money required to air a commercial during the coveted Super Bowl time slot doesn’t necessarily mean you’re out of luck. All it takes is a little bit of ingenuity to ensure that your brand is buzzing around in people’s heads as the big day approaches. Just ask the folks at Newcastle Brown Ale.

According to Adweek, Newcastle couldn’t afford to compete with big beer brands like Budweiser that always seem to dominate during the Super Bowl, so instead, the brand opted to poke fun of Super Bowl commercials — and itself — by producing an anti-ad campaign called “If We Made It.” The website features a series of amusing YouTube videos that document the making of what the brand calls “the mega huge football game ad we couldn’t afford.”

In one of the most popular videos, actress Anna Kendrick talks about the Newcastle ad she “almost starred in.” Kendrick explains how she isn’t even sure why the company hired her, noting that she doesn’t consider herself “beer commercial babe hot.”

The video is pretty hilarious, and already has 1.2 million views, showing that in order to create a web based marketing campaign that makes a lasting impression, you don’t need to spend millions of dollars.

“We think the formula for creating the most epic Big Game commercial of all time is pretty simple, but when it comes down to it, we’d rather have people drink our beer while watching other companies’ ads,” Charles van Es, senior brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale, said in a press release.