Inheritance campaign
Issue 14 | March 2010
Agency
EHS Brann, Cirencester
Creative Team
Creative Director: Frazer Howard, Associate Creative Director - Copywriter: Jimmy Thompson, Associate Creative Director - Art Director: Tim Waltho
Production Team
Project Manager: Lynda Williams
Other Credits
Account Manager: Ben Matthews, Account Director: Anita Wiltshire, Head of Planning: Matthew Fitzsimmons
Date
December 2009
Background
Foster’s marketing campaign has been centred on the thought ‘Get some Australian in you’, the TV advertising featuring characters who behave in a particularly relaxed and ‘no worries’ way because they have Australian ancestry.
The agency’s challenge was to take this attitude and bring it to life in direct marketing.
Idea
A pack was mailed out purporting to come from a firm of solicitors informing the recipient that he could be in line for an inheritance from a possible Aussie ancestor. The inheritance? A year’s supply of Foster’s.
All he had to do to be in with a chance to get his hands on all the cases of Foster’s was go to a website and do a simple test to see if he did indeed have any Australian in him.
The pack contained a letter from Cobber Strewth & Digger Solicitors, a letter from Bruce Foster suggesting to the recipient that he might possibly have been his grandfather, and to top it all off, a Gentleman’s Interest magazine from Bruce’s distant youth containing suggestive photographs of Sheilas displaying their wrists, their ankles, the lot!
Originally entitled “Sheila’s Heels”, the lawyers insisted on a name change to “Sizzling Sheilas”.
In short, it was a pack to promote a prize draw relying on smutty innuendo and the suggestion that your gran might have been a bit of a go-er, with a fake porn magazine from 1949.
Results
The campaign went down a treat, a bit like a pint of the amber nectar itself, with an amazing 18.37% response rate.
In addition, creative impact research is carried out after each mailing. The numbers are not due until after Directory has been published but the last few mailings have achieved 99% open rates.
Our Thoughts
When a brand knows who its true fans are then it can set about turning them into brand ambassadors. The tricky part is in finding out who they are and kicking off some sort of a conversation with them.
This campaign seems to me to be the first part of a long-term engagement strategy, which will lead to an ever-deeper relationship with a group of Foster’s loyalists who will become more and more vocal in social media on behalf of the brand.
Why would they do this? Partly because they like Foster’s but also because the idea of accessing ‘the Australian in you’ is fun and appealing to us Brits in a cold, grey, economically-knackered and stressful environment.