OMB to “pull and retool” its recent ad campaign
Two weeks after unveiling its “Now You Know Better” campaign, The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery will pull down its billboards and retool the messaging behind its latest ads.
The campaign (see the ads here) was meant to educate consumers about how detrimental bad beer can be to the craft beer industry. But due to the language used (especially “craft beer roulette”), many interpreted the ads as a shot at other small or local brewers.
The brewery didn’t receive many such complaints in the taproom, but its sales director Ryan Self fielded more than a few on Facebook. These came from friends who would otherwise be willing to give the brewery a fair shake, but even they couldn’t get behind the new campaign.
“It’s seeing our fans say, ‘I love OMB and I love their branding, but I don’t get this,’” said Self. “That’s what got us going.”
Related contentI sat down with Self this past week, and we talked at length about the problems bad beer creates for others in the industry. If someone comes to craft beer for the first time and has a bad experience, for example, they might be less likely to try OMB or other craft breweries in the future. It’s why he and others at OMB have long sung the praises of their fellow brewers, because if a patron has a great experience with one brewery they’re far more likely to try beers from other local breweries.
But at the end of the day, the ads can’t be judged based on the brewery’s intent.
“When you make an ad campaign, it’s all about perception,” said Self. “If you make an ad campaign and someone says that campaign made me feel negative about your brand, then you have failed. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve focus grouped it and how much money you’ve spent developing it or how much thought you put into it. If people say ‘I’m less likely to drink an OMB,’ then it’s a failure.”
The first step in addressing the reactions to the campaign came last week, when the brewery posted this explanation on its website. They will soon remove the billboards and online ads, but plan to replace them with new ads that will also be aimed at educating people on the difference between good and bad beer.
“Our next campaign is not going to back away from the idea that craft is not synonymous with quality,” said Self. “Neither is local, frankly. Local can mean fresher which can mean quality, but that’s not always the case.”
The brewery hasn’t finalized details for the new ads yet, but expect them to be more inline with OMB’s typical aesthetic, which Self describes as “classic and traditional.”
“We are not every brewery to every person,” said Self. “We recognize that we don’t make every style of beer. There are some very popular styles that we don’t make. That’s okay. It’s sort of the anti-arrogance. So to hear us called arrogant to me was alarming. We failed majorly somewhere in that case, because that’s not who we are. That’s not who we want to be at all.”
This story was originally published July 19, 2016 at 10:29 PM with the headline "OMB to “pull and retool” its recent ad campaign."