Newcastle Beer may not be able to compete with the Budweiser TV spots this Super Bowl, but it is certainly managing to hijack the conversation.
The beer company is running a hilariously subversive campaign that satirizes all the popular Super Bowl advertising tropes while mocking itself for not having the budget to do a real Super Bowl ad.
Partnering with agency Droga5, Newcastle is creating parodies of everything related to Super Bowl marketing, including flashy TV productions, focus groups, celebrity endorsements and even native ads, (as you can see from this awesomely sarcastic piece of sponsored content on Gawker.) The campaign titled “If We Made It” centers around the theme of how awesome Newcastle’s ads would be if it had the permission, or the money to make a Super Bowl ad. Which of course it doesn’t.
“We think the formula for creati
ng 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,” said Charles van Es, senior brand director for Newcastle Brown Ale in a statement. “And to be honest, we don’t really have the money or permission to advertise on the game either.”
Here are the videos:
And my personal favorite of course would be this brilliantly comic non-endorsement by actress Anna Kendrick:
