Beck’s
Posted on Tuesday, 18 October
Reasons Not Rules
Publicis Modem
2010
Concepting, Copywriting
The task
Making a responsible drinking message resonate with young men in the UK.
The challenges
Avoiding an authoritative tone that would alienate the target demographic; minimizing the appearance of hypocrisy. (A responsible drinking campaign from a spirits company could easily be viewed with suspicion.)
The keys
For the demographic, drinking is a social experience – the campaign had to be as well. Peer-to-peer communication is not about response to authority, but rather shared experience, interests and values. Encouraging friends to share their own reasons for not overindulging was one prong of the approach.
The other prong entailed applying peer pressure in a counterintuitive direction: encouraging friends to rat each other out – in a light-hearted way – via social media when they do something embarrassing under the influence of alcohol. Touchpoints included a series of humorous Web videos illustrating the pitfalls of drinking to excess.
Using friendship and humor to promote responsible drinking was on brand and consistent with Publicis’ prior work on Beck’s.
