The Australian Effie Awards

1. Agency: Clemenger BBDO Proximity – Melbourne.
2. Advertiser: Carlton & United Breweries
3. Entry Title: Carlton Draught Drop the Bomb
4. Category for this Entry: Category J – Return on Investment
5. Author: Michael McKeown & Paul Rees-Jones
6. Phone (03) 9869 4185 7. Email michael.mckeown@clemenger.com.au

8a Total Campaign Expenditure
Include production and value of donated media and non-traditional paid media. Check one.

◊Under $500K
◊ $500 – $1 million
♦ $1 – 2 million
◊ $2 – 5 million
◊$5 – 10 million
◊ $10 – 20 million
◊ $20 – 40 million
◊ $40 million and over

8b What was the strategic communications challenge?
What was going on in your category? Provide information on the category, marketplace, company, competitive environment, target audience and/or the product /service that created your challenge and your response to it.
The challenge for Carlton Draught was to bridge the „two worlds‟ of the evolving Australian beer market, the „old world‟ of traditional mainstream beers and new „modern world‟ of domestic sub-premium, premium and import offerings, and in doing so grow sales in this highly competitive, increasingly saturated category. All this in a more regulated retail environment.
Over the past decade Carlton Draught had grown substantially to become the second biggest full strength mainstream beer in Australia. The brand‟s aggressive national rollout since 2001 resulted in both sales and volume growth across a broad drinker base, ably supported by the well known and loved „Made from beer‟ campaign. But soon after Carlton Draught‟s rollout the market itself underwent dramatic change with new players and extended brand variants in evolving segments intruding on the more traditional space mainstream beers used to so comfortably occupy.
Traditional Australian mainstream beers such as Carlton Draught, VB, Tooheys New and XXXX Bitter came under siege by easier drinking, dry style and low carbohydrate alternatives such as Tooheys Extra Dry, Corona, Pure Blonde and Hahn Super Dry. These more modern, less challenging beers offered younger guys in their 20‟s and early 30‟s both image and taste options that let them opt out of the more traditional brands their „dads drank‟ and begin a new ritual for their own generation. Beers they perceived to be crisper, drier, cleaner and often healthier.

But not only was there consumer change, the retail environment was also becoming more challenging. The two major retailers in the alcohol industry, Woolworths and Coles, had begun to dominate retail sales within the category, squeezing out the independent retailers. By expanding their store footprint and purchasing power they had successfully been able to significantly discount brands across the category in order to gain market share. This price war between the majors led to premium and imported beers being significantly discounted to the price levels of the domestic beer brands, including Carlton Draught. Brands such as Heineken and Becks could be regularly purchased for the same price as Carlton Draught.
With their ever-increasing influence in the alcohol sector, in 2007 Woolworths and Coles introduced a clean store policy which eradicated free-standing sales promotional material in their in-store environments. Up to this point, this type of promotional material had been the corner stone for major brands during peak sales periods but could now no longer be relied on.
So by the beginning of 2009 traditional beer brands, including a substantial but increasingly threatened Carlton Draught, were facing hyper competition from new beers that didn‟t play by the old beer rules and a retail environment that was far from as easy to influence as it used to be.
By March Carlton Draught was at an interesting tipping point; the most recent instalment of the „Made from beer‟ campaign „Skytroop‟ had been widely embraced but was reaching saturation in awareness and brand connection. We needed a communication approach that would drive sales across the key Easter sales period but also importantly reinvigorate the brand to be more relevant and involving for a younger audience who were more easily tempted by these new beer offerings.

8c What were your objectives? State specific goals.
Your entry is expected to include compelling data including behavioural objectives and results. Only in rare instances are the judges likely to award an entry that only demonstrates attitudinal changes. Provide a % or # for all goals. If you do not have a specific type of objective (e.g. no quantifiable objectives), state this in the entry form and explain why and why the objectives you do have are significant and challenging in the context of your category, etc. You must provide benchmark and context for your goals versus year prior and in context of competitive landscape and category.

Carlton Draught was a brand under significant pressure and in danger of losing relevance with a younger drinker market to these more modern, more relevant beers. To help restore and secure the future of the brand we had 3 core objectives to meet:
1. Although Carlton Draught is quite obviously a draught beer, key to attracting our younger drinkers was to increase pack sales of the brand (24 pack and 30 pack cartons) by a total of 9% over a defined key selling period. Bottled beer being particularly relevant to this younger market for everyday in-home consumption and relaxed social drinking occasions with their mates. Given CUB negotiated promotional slots with retailers and had to balance these slots across its entire beer portfolio, Carlton Draught was allocated March 1 – April 9, 2009 as its promotional period. And as part of this objective a 4% continued lift in sales was set for the month after the promotional period until May 10. Historically, at the end of a promotional period sales quickly fall below pre-promotional weights with forward purchasing behaviour. Could we sustain sales with our idea post promotion?

2. Our second objective was to lift consumer engagement, especially against 18 – 29 year old guys who were more likely to be switching to these more modern beer alternatives. We had to create a promotional idea that would achieve at a minimum a total redemption rate of between 2 – 21⁄2%. Carlton Draught‟s average to date was no more than 2% so we set our target at an ambitious 3% redemption rate, and based on sales numbers, would translate to 28,000 entries.

3. Our last objective was to leverage the existing „Skytroop‟ campaign that launched the year before and link to its theme to add continuity to the pending promotional campaign and appeal to a younger audience. Key to this was creating talkability and high target audience involvement. We had to find a way to get these guys to want to participate with brand, get closer.

9a What was your strategy – and how did you get there?

What was your strategy? Was it driven by a consumer insight or channel insight or marketplace / brand opportunity? Explain how it originated and how the strategy addressed the challenge.

With ambitious objectives and enormous pressure Carlton Draught required a sales promotion that could change the game all together, appealing to these younger drinkers but still be true the brand.
Carlton Draught‟s „Made From Beer‟ campaign had allowed us to talk to consumers directly and honestly since its inception almost a decade ago. However the brand needed to behave differently to not just achieve cut through but engage with this more demanding audience. Crucially, the beer needed to the bridge the gap between the „old world‟ image and behaviour of the more traditional beers it was grouped with and these new, more relevant, seemingly attractive brands that did not just deliver on a product level to younger drinkers but perceptually on brand experience too.
On a brand level, the „Skytroop‟ campaign was still true to a beer that was, in a positioning sense, nothing but a „good honest beer‟ and as a consequence still calling things that were a bit „on the nose‟. Events such as those infamous half-time spectaculars at Australian football code‟s grand finals. You know the ones, when we think this is the year where going to finally see something better, even amazing but each turns out to be just a bit….ordinary. That‟s the ironic tone Carlton Draught has been able to set for almost a decade and „Skytroop‟ was a continuation of this theme by calling a spectacular that really wasn‟t all that spectacular.
It was within this vale of irony that we believed Carlton Draught could be true it its mainstream beer roots. But it could also appeal to this younger mindset by capturing their imaginations using the very thing that connected them with experiences and brands they felt attracted to and wanted to be part of.
Bringing together the agency‟s own trend work and working closely with CUB‟s Insights team exploring the lives of these younger guys was particularly profound. While conducting depth interviews and affinity groups, when we probed all the product claims and associated imagery of the latest and greatest beer offerings, something counterintuitive happened. Instead of believing everything new was an improvement on the previous generation, including these „new world‟ beers, they where in fact highly cynical of an idealised beer world and would rather be part of something with no pretence. Carlton Draught was a good beer but that‟s all it was and this admission needed to be harnessed because our younger drinkers responded so positively to this honesty. That‟s why „Made from beer‟ struck such a chord with them. And we needed to elevate and demonstrate this openness with an all or nothing attitude our guys could buy into because this was the black and white way of their day-to-day world. If the brand could behave this way and reward them either literally or figuratively for this shared attitude, we knew our „old‟ and „new‟ bridge could be crossed.

Given the nature of the idea and the need to appeal to a more demanding but open audience, one medium held enormous appeal and that was radio. With a retail edge, flexibility and an insatiable appetite for content, radio was perfect, especially with a secondary digital platform to help us create content to draw our audience in and ensure their involvement. So we needed to engage the right media partner. A partner that could share the brand‟s own self-effacing manner with a high degree of versatility to capture those all important spontaneous moments that could create the genuine entertainment value of the whole „bomb‟ experience.
Given our twenty-something core target, and working closely with Mediacom, we agreed there really was an ideal vehicle that was a bullseye for this campaign – Hamish and Andy on the Austereo network (Fox, 2dayFM, B105). They were the biggest show on air against our young core audience profile. But with the obvious appeal of the duo also came a number of challenges. As a radio property, Hamish and Andy wanted to protect their brand but we wanted to exploit it, that‟s the Carlton Draught way. They wanted control while we wanted anything to happen as „Drop the Bomb‟ unfolded. And being a commercial property, getting approvals to involve the guys more closely with the promotion to the point of dropping the „bomb‟ was a slow and complex process. But we prevailed.
After 6 weeks of logistics preparation we finally launched the promotion that resulted in one the most ironic of results. The person who finally had their car selected as the worst „bomb‟ of all was Gill, a 28 year old woman and our „bomb‟ aimer Bill, a 65 year old man (who happened to be a double amputee). You could say neither where our core target but true to Carlton Draught‟s ironic touch it worked more for the brand than against it to involve our younger drinkers. They loved the imperfection of it all.
And the result on the day: Bill hit the target, won the money and Gill drove off in her new car. Equally outstanding were the results, both sales and audience involvement.

11 How do you know your campaign was successful?
Detail why you consider your effort a success. Refer to your objectives (results must relate directly to your objectives in (8c) – restate them and provide results) and demonstrate how you met or exceeded those objectives using quantitative and behavioural metrics. Did your effort drive business? Did it drive awareness and consumer/business behaviour? Use charts and data whenever possible. Explain what x% means in your category. For confidential information proof of performance may be indexed if desired. Demonstrate the correlation between activity and outcomes.
Make sure you address every objective, whether fully achieved or not. Indicate why the results you have are significant in the context of your category, competition and product / service.
You need to convince the judges that the marketing investment provided a positive financial return – if that was a requirement. Indexing of data is acceptable. Your entry will not be ineligible if you don‟t provide any data, but entries that do provide convincing evidence will gain additional marks. (Note that this data can be excluded from the published case on request.)

Our primary objective was a direct sales response during the promotional period and a residual lift the month after.
For the key promotional period Carlton Draught sales value for March 2009 increased +19.3% YOY and subsequently a further +11.9 YOY in April translating into a higher volume of beer being sold ex-factory as outlined below.

Our second objective was to lift consumer engagement and the campaign delivered significantly in this area too.
The number of entries for the carton promotion totaled 53,748 achieving a redemption rate of 4%. Not only did we exceed the target 3% (28,000 entries) redemption by 50% but achieved double Carlton Draught‟s average 2% return from previous promotions. All this in a more competitive landscape with far greater retail environment restrictions.
In terms of people donating their much prized old „bombs‟, the online voters had the choice of 163 cars people were willing to donate to the cause with the very real possibility of being left with no wheels at all.
Our final and crucial objective was for Carlton Draught was not just to engage with a younger audience but create talkability and involvement.
The momentum created by the build-up to the drop, and with such strong content to work from, encouraged Hamish and Andy to dedicate a full show to the actual event and the day preceding it. In fact as the actual drop went „live‟ to air over 1 million listeners tuned in to experience the drama unfold.

Online interaction also delivered an extraordinary set of numbers:
 128,000 video views in 7 hours
 354,240 total video views
 Total video view minutage: over 3,200 hours (equivalent of 133 days)
 4.4m page impressions (against a planned 785,000)
The media where also quick to take-up our story with 32 „live read‟ impacts that cumulatively ran for 106 minutes (against an average 16 minutes for such a promotion).
In terms of a total media expenditure of $344k, overall media exposure for the campaign was valued at more than $1.6m or 466% of the negotiated rate. (Data source Mediacom)
Significantly the overall return on investment for the campaign (Incremental Revenue minus Total Campaign Cost [media + production] over Total Campaign Cost x 100%) delivered an ROI of +130%.
12 Convince us that the result was not due to other factors.
You must explain in your entry the effect of any other potentially relevant factors such as product changes, pricing changes, distribution changes, competitive activity, press coverage, economic conditions, weather etc. Advertising does not often work in isolation, but the judges need to be convinced that your campaign had a major impact on results.
Carlton Draught‟s „Drop the Bomb‟ success was not due to distribution gains. In fact distribution for the promotional period versus March 2008 actually decreased by 14%. This figure is determined by orders taken by CUB up to March 30 and is also partly due to increased competition within the retail environment, major retailers outselling smaller independent retailers and subsequently closing them down over the period.

The campaign‟s success was not due to dominant media expenditure with „Drop the Bomb‟ accounting for only 4% of full strength domestic traditional beer 2009 media spend. (source AC Nielsen Adex)

Carlton Draught‟s sales result was also not the beneficiary of any organic growth in the category and as established earlier, was in fact facing fragmenting drinker practices. Overall full-strength traditional beer sales for the promotional period were down with major brands experiencing declines by as much as 8%.(Source AC Nielsen May 2010)
„Drop the Bomb‟s‟ success was not due to other communications support for Carlton Draught. There was no other mainstream, direct, promotional or online activity over the period for the brand. And the PR noise generated was as a direct result of the campaign.
And when reviewing the results of any communication in the beer category, we have to take into account any seasonal affects in terms of the weather. In this instance, during the promotional period and subsequent months, the temperature met seasonal averages. (source BOM)

13 Executive Summary
An Executive Summary of no more than 100 words is also required (not included in page count).

Carlton Draught‟s „Drop the Bomb‟ successfully bridged the gap between the „old world‟ of traditional mainstream beers where the brand had so comfortably resided and the „new world‟ of more modern beers that were so rapidly encroaching on its space.
By dropping an old „bomb‟ out of a plane at 14,000ft we took a beer with a pedigree for standing out to new heights, quite literally, and created an interactive sales promotion idea that not only captured the imagination but delivered a +19.3% year on year sales result over the promotional period with a 130% return on investment.