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Newcastle Can’t Afford Super Bowl Commercials, Goes Viral Anyway

The Big Game is only a few days away but if social media is to be believed, Newcastle Brown Ale may have won Super Bowl commercials for the year with their “If We Made It” campaign.

The brewer didn’t make its proposed “S**** B***” commercial but they definitely told a lot of people about what they would have done if they had the money! Well, that and if Anheuser-Busch InBev’s exclusive Super Bowl deal didn’t exist, which “locks all other beer brands out from airing Super Bowl ads.”

The “If We Made It” spots feature Behind-The-Scenes interviews with people who might have been involved with the commercial. This includes focus groups having the commercial described to them, Keyshawn Johnson discussing his would-be-role as the voice of a cat on a skateboard, and an interview with Pitch Perfect star Anna Kendrick about her almost casting as “Hot Girl #1.”

 

It’s pretty interesting that Newcastle is getting such traction for a handful of internet spots when the deals revolving around the actual Super Bowl commercials are pretty staggering. Forbes.com blogger Avi Dan reports that through Anheuser-Busch InBev’s exclusive deal with the NFL, the giant brewery conglomerate “bought 4 minutes of airtime to the tune of more than $30 million. A-B InBev is also spending millions on such celebrity appearances like Arnold Schwartzenegger, Don Cheadle and comedian/musician Reggie Watts that appear in the ads.”

No word yet on what Newcastle’s “If We Made It” budget was, but my guess is that it cost them a lot less than $30 Million….

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  9. Shelly the Turtle says:

    Oops. Eulo, I just realized what you meant. After I watched through all the Newcastle ads on this page and the comments about how much money they must have actually cost Newcastle to make, and I thought you were talking about the money they spent to make those.

    You were probably referring to the amount above all that where the article mentions how much Anheuser-Busch is spending.

  10. Shelly the Turtle says:

    @Eulo – Anheuser-Busch doesn’t make Newcastle.

  11. Ross says:

    If they didn’t include Humble Pie’s “Thirty Days in the Hole” as the play-out music, they failed…

  12. Nate says:

    What makes you think they haven’t spent “a ton of money”? Newcastle is a brand owned by a company (Heineken) that has over 18 billion Euro per year in retail sales. If Heineken thought big budget TV ads were the best fit for the product, they could and would pay for them. This ad campaign includes a number of celebrities who had to be paid large fees, huge numbers of creative personnel involved, large casts of extras, and probably one of the larger ad buys in Facebook and online history. Just because they didn’t spend millions for one specific ad placement on the Super Bowl (something they couldn’t have done anyway, given the Anheuser agreement) does not make this an inexpensive “underground” effort, and I still challenge the use of the word “viral” to describe it. Has it been successful? Absolutely. Are the ads funny? Probably, I haven’t actually watched them. I just have issues with commercials being sold as entertainment.

  13. John says:

    I don’t know what Nate is thinking but this was a pretty great idea. The Anna Kendrick video alone has over 3.5 million views. That im pretty sure is viral. and the others have like 500-700k views. Props to Newcastle for doing a great job marketing without spending a ton of money. Personally though i would love to see this commercial!

  14. Norval Alleman says:

    I don’t always drink XX I do however like New Castle.

  15. Nate says:

    You might want to work on your definition of “going viral” . . . paying large amounts of money to place your online ads prominently all over services like Facebook and then seeing some success in having people Share those ads is not the same thing.

    Thumbs down to bringing the Nerdist tone of breathless enthusiasm and positivity to coverage of ad campaigns, something that seems to be happening with increasing frequency around here.

  16. Eulo says:

    It’s a shame A-B didn’t use that money to figure out how to filter the urine out of most of their beers.

  17. alex says:

    Well now I have to try some, you guys really hit is out of the park on this one.

  18. Jeremy says:

    I gotta try that stuff. And Budweiser really isn’t good anyway.

  19. adam says:

    that beer’s helped me through rough times, have to say. i’ll give newkie brown it’s due, the bottle’s great in a fight.

  20. Blake says:

    Well, I have a new brand of beer I drink exclusively.