brad van schaik

Corona / Stella / Shocktop

I’ve worked with lot of beer brands, helping them find ways to authentically integrate into the lives of consumers. This is a selection of some of that thinking.

Stella artois wanted our agency to deliver a stella experience where people least expected it.

Prior to the summer of 2018, we caught wind of Toronto’s King Street pilot, a plan to breath some more life into its core. The city was set to close two full traffic lanes on one of Toronto’s major streets so they could be converted into social gathering spaces. My agency worked with Stella to put in an application for “Cafe Artois,” the largest patio space in the entire pilot program.

It quickly became one of the most unique spaces in Toronto to share a beer and some bites with friends.

Those who got a table at Cafe Artois enjoyed live music, European inspired games, Stella chalice engraving, and live portrait paintings. The patio took up both sides of the street, creating an unavoidable footprint along one of Toronto’s main arteries.

we invited Torontonians to the cafe with an out of home campaign and chaperoned them there with the help of the city.

We also invited people with geo-targetted preroll on social.

Sexual innuendo doesn’t work for every brand, but it was low hanging fruit for Shock top at some of the summer’s biggest beer festivals.

One of the biggest challenges at festivals is getting your product in the hands of festival-goers. Often, visitors have only purchased a certain number of tokens (festival currency) and end up redeeming them for the most unique craft brews they can find - a bit of a problem for a mainstream Labatt brand.

So we didn’t try to compete at all. Hand over fist sampling was not a game we’d win. Instead, we sampled a ridiculous social experiment you could try with friends (or strangers).

With samples of Shock Top, we gave people a velcro cuff with a leash attached. That leash could be secured to anyone else with a cuff of their own. The challenge? To have a big “Orangy” with your friends and see if you could all sample Shock Top at the same time.

While admittedly, this is all a low brow joke, it worked. Orangys took place all over festivals and broke through the clutter in two ways:

1. Communicated the citrus flavour cues of the beer (a major brand objective)

2. Seeing people participating in “Orangys” around the festival created curiosity and demand that drew people to the Shock Top footprint, rather than brand ambassadors having to oversell and out-shout competing brand activations.

It was a pull strategy, versus a push - people came to Shock Top instead of us pushing Shock Top on them.

Here’s what the Orangys looked like in action. Don’t worry, the video is SFW.

We designed the shock Top footprint to embrace the wit and edge of the brand’s established personality.

The tone of the brand let us really push the language into a compelling space. A little clever art direction, helped sell the joke to those who may have had a couple beers already :)

For Corona I was brought in after a massive concert series was sold in. Lemme give you some background on that first.

Corona Sunsets was an existing property (an EDM music festival) and my agency was tasked to give it a unique Canadian spin. My talented colleagues, Sasha Newton and Dan Berzen pitched a first-of-its-kind version of the show that would follow the sunset across Canada. It would start in Eastern Canada and end in the West, each show starting as the sun set in the host city.

Giant acts were booked, which created a massive draw IRL. Every show sold out quickly. Millions also tuned in online to a livestream that cut to each city, as the sun set and the show began. Here’s a quick recap of the stream, originally broadcast live on YouTube.

So what did I do? My role was to lead a team that would document the events and cut some post show content together. We didn’t do that.

Let’s be honest, no one in history has ever thought to themselves “Man, I can’t wait for that brand to show me the cool event they hosted for people who aren’t me!” Instead, we pitched something that would offer some value to the online community.

I lead a team of creatives and directors to shoot a series of three music videos, shot on location in three of the festival locations.

Each would feature a track from the headliner in each city and connect to the next video in the series, taking inspiration from the festival concept. We launched the triptych of videos and each quickly got hundreds of thousands of views. For fans of the genre and of the headliners, this was a far more authentic way for Corona to serve them content that was worthy of their feeds.