Gaza Border Beer
Alexander Beer
Issue 50 | February 2019
Agency
Leo Burnett Israel
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Ami Alush Creative Director Elad Galzier Art Director Olga Vorabieva
Production Team
Production Company Omri Paz Photographer Menachem Reiss
Other Credits
PR Company Karvat & Weiss
Date
December 2018
Background
Alexander was a small Israeli boutique beer brewery in a market dominated by wellfunded, international beer brands.
They wanted to break into the consciousness of Israeli beer drinkers and give them a reason to choose Alexander over the more famous brands.
Idea
Gaza Border Beer was a first-of-a-kind limited-edition beer, made with wheat salvaged from over 28,000 hectares of wheat fields along the Gaza border that had been torched.
Incendiary kites launched by Gazans, basically kites carrying Molotov cocktails, became a phenomenon in 2018, setting fire to swathes of the landscape, destroying wildlife as well as crops in Israel.
Much of the very wheat that Alexander depended on for their beer was turned to ash. Made from wheat that had escaped the flames, Gaza Border Beer was a way ordinary Israelis could show their solidarity with their farming brothers.
200,000 bottles were produced. It was launched with a TV commercial in which farmers talked about the pain of losing their livelihoods to the fires.
Results
Israelis responded immediately and bought up the entire supply of limited-edition beer in just five days. Alexander sold more beer in one week than in the previous six months.
Alexander Gaza Border Beer became a trending topic on Google.
It is still being brewed today and $60,000 in profits has been handed back to Gaza border farmers.
Our Thoughts
We’ve included this in the ‘Innovation’ section of Directory because, while it may not be technology-based, it is a completely new sort of answer to a terrible problem.
The best agencies are creative business partners with their clients, not just having the ideas to make their communications work better but having the ideas to make their businesses work better.
It was Winston Churchill who said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. While it would be invidious of Alexander to exploit the ravages of guerrilla warfare in their country, in putting the farmers on TV and in handing them a percentage of the profits, everybody gets to win.