The Social Beer
Norrlands Guld
Issue 48 | September 2018
Agency
Akestam Holst Noa
Creative Team
Creative Director Magnus Jakobsson Art Director Martin Noreby Art Director Joakim Khoury Copywriter Simon Lublin Copywriter Daniel Vaccino
Production Team
Go! Fight! Fantastic! / Bkry Photography Bsmart
Other Credits
Account Manager Bella Lagerquist Client Director Fredrik Burman PR Strategist Ida Persson Digital Strategist Hanna Brochs
Date
June 2018
Background
Around the world, people came together in large numbers to watch the FIFA Football World Cup on TV screens in pubs and bars in their home towns.
But the World Cup also happens to be the single most tweeted event in the world. In 2014, it inspired 672 million tweets and the likelihood was that number would be exceeded in 2018.
Swedish beer brand Norrlands Guld stood for togetherness. When mates were having a beer together, they should be enjoying the banter, discussing the game with each other – not bent over their mobile phones.
Idea
To encourage mates to actually talk about the football rather than tweet about it, a printer that used malt-based ink was created to print topical tweets onto the foam of their beers.
An algorithm looked for active users and relevant hashtags to send them via Wi-Fi through to the printer in real-time. The machine scaled the tweets to size before laying them down on the beer’s foamy head.
Results
‘Social beer’, as it was called, made its first appearance in select bars in Sweden when the country played a warm-up match against Denmark.
As yet, the full results are not known.
Our Thoughts
One of the problems for beer brands in the UK (and I’m sure it’s the same in Sweden) is that increasingly people are watching the big games at home rather than in the pub. Anything that gets lads (and lassies) off their sofas and into the local for a group experience has got to be good news for the brewers.
This is just a stunt, really. But it is a good PR story which would have created buzz, I’m sure. Also, there is a human truth to it that I’m sure resonates with many of us: that texting and tweeting is not a substitute for a real conversation.