E-Malt.com News article: Australia & USA: Foster’s withdraws from television to internet advertising

Foster's (FGL) will no longer advertise its eponymous, iconic beer on US television. Foster's has always struggled to reach more than simply curious American beer drinkers in the land of Budweiser and Miller. Its 2005 television advertising budget was US$5 million, considered too small a budget to make an impact.

Now Foster's plans to spend all of its budget on internet advertising. This was not a decision made in haste. Rather, it was a decision based on the success of a little test the company ran last year. It all has to do with the now famous "Big Ad".

The Big Ad was part of an ongoing campaign from Carlton & United Breweries, Foster's beer producer, to revitalise its dwindling sales of flagship brand Carlton Draught. The campaign has been centred on satirical humour, and the idea of the Big Ad was to send up the high-budget television advertisements of past years, particularly those of British Airways.

Apart from being an amusing piece of marketing, the Big Ad provided a test case by being released on the internet some three weeks before it reached television screens. The impact has since become a world-wide talking point.

To begin with, the company only sent the ad out to company employees. They then did the rest. Not because they were told to, but because they liked the ad and so emailed it to some mates. Those mates emailed it to other mates, and before the ad even reached TV, a million people had seen the ad.

It's now been about a year since the Big Ad was launched, and Foster's credits the campaign with increasing Carlton Draught's share of the Australian beer market by 1.44% to 9.2%. That equates to some 36 million extra stubbies (AC Nielsen).

Viral marketing works on the simple basis of word of mouth. Word of mouth is probably the greatest marketing tool of all, and the advent of the internet has meant the entire world can now join in one big water-cooler conversation. We all receive jokes, photos and video clips from our mates over email, and if we like them we pass them on to a selection of other mates. This is a geometric growth phenomenon, and it costs nothing.

Exploiting viral marketing is not just a case of placing any old thing on the net. Quality is still paramount, and the internet generation is savvy enough to see right through pretenders. Thus Foster's recognises that it still has to approach its internet advertising the right way, and after all the Big Ad did cost millions to produce.

Foster's new campaign, commencing with 16 separate ads created by Ogilvy & Mather, opens on the website Heavy.com. This particular site is targeted at young men and features music and videos. The site's slogan is "Because TV sucks".

And this is the crux of the matter.


25 August, 2006