Garage Beer is getting ready for March Madness with a humorous play that looks to help basketball-obsessed consumers who have faced “accusations of job abandonment” and sports-betting losses, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
The effort sees the independent beer brand enlisting Jay Bilas, the college basketball commentator and an actual lawyer, as its “Attorney at Lager.” Bilas stars in a video spot that parodies local lawyer ads and offers a hotline, 1-833-FORBEER, where consumers can leave messages for the brand. Garage Beer is also running a sweepstakes for a $5,000 gift card for ticket broker TickPick.
The “Attorney at Lager” campaign is the latest example of Garage Beer’s approach to marketing, where no idea is too low-brow. Take for example the brand’s regional Super Bowl ad that parodied Budweiser’s iconic Clydesdales and saw co-owner Jason Kelce smear horse crap on his face.
“Dumb is hard to replicate,” said Garage Beer Chief Creative Officer Corey Smale. “The authenticity that the brand has put out there over the last few years is uniquely ours. We have to stay committed to that.”
That authenticity — along with heavy doses of absurd jokes and Kelce appearances — animates Garage Beer’s content marketing approach. The brand recently launched a weekly social series on Instagram titled “Thank Garage It’s Friday” that looks to update the must-see TV of the 1990s during a moment of fragmented consumer attention.
“Our brand is so rooted in nostalgia and entertainment, aside from making good beer,” Smale said. “All we're trying to do is find a day or a time of the week where hopefully we can catch a majority of our audience's attention and give them something silly, something to laugh at.”
So far, the social series has featured visits to a fictional Garage Labs where Kelce and friends test wacky inventions, like powdered beer or a drill that chills a brew, as well as mock press conferences about the beer being recalled for being “too beer flavored.”
“If I can get someone to stop and be entertained for seven to maybe up to 90 seconds, then our job is done,” Smale said. “We're not very precious about it, because I understand how fleeting things are.”
Big game lessons
Garage Beer’s Super Bowl ad, a 60-second spot that aired in the Philadelphia designated market area, and surrounding campaign demonstrate how the brand is staying nimble to compete with much larger brewers. As brands increasingly tease and release their ads before the big game, the Super Bowl ad competition has moved online.
“Being a brand that can't afford national broadcast television commercials, we're on somewhat of a level playing field,” Smale said. “If it's just the internet, then it's a matter of how much money you have for PR or paid media. Luckily, our stuff is so dumb that it organically goes above the competition in a lot of ways.”
The big game play was also a lesson in turning social listening into action. While the Garage Beer team thought that the toilet humor would grab attention, consumers were more interested in the miniature horse that appears in the ad. The brand quickly pivoted and put more attention on the horse, putting out a t-shirt, giving away stickers and running a sweepstakes to give consumers a chance to meet the horse during a day on the farm.
“We're obviously not the biggest. We might be the fastest, and we're definitely the dumbest. That combination allows us to see what's working, and then just go all the way with it,” Smale said.
Garage Beer is also tying into Super Bowl lore for its latest long-form content play, following previous efforts that have parodied films like “Predator” and martial arts movies of the ’80s and ’90s. The brand is working on a claymation video, originally intended to run during halftime, that nods to a millennial favorite “Celebrity Deathmatch” that aired on MTV during the halftime in 1998.
“I want to make more tangible stuff. I want to make more physical goods. I'm getting so bored with content,” Smale said of the plan to release the special on DVD. “We desperately want to be able to touch and consume media in new ways. We're a little tapped out, pun intended, on the phone.”
Building community
Garage Beer has made physical goods a part of its value proposition for fans of the brand. Sometimes, there will be actual demand for a fake product or a prop from a video, like a rake with a built-in beer holder. But as Garage Beer grows its profile and retail footprint — the brand is available in 50 states — it is working to attach larger creative concepts to product and retail pushes. The brand recently shot a Western-style film that will promote a product release in April that Smale said will “dynamically change [its] business.”
Garage Beer makes all of this content and physical goods with a small in-house team that only has a handful of people. Because of the brand’s specific tone and reference points, Smale does not see it ever relying on outside agencies. Instead, it is turning to micro-groups within its larger community of consumers to build the brand, operating a DM group on Instagram targeted at about 5,000 of the brand’s super fans that is a percentage of its overall online following.
“We'll use that as a channel to test out things before it goes out for mass release,” Smale said of the group. “I want to focus on some of the die-hards and figure out how we can really lock them in and keep them advocating for the brand in just crazy ways.”
As an example of the lengths the brand will go, Smale points to a recent occasion where a follower who constantly posts about Garage Beer asked the brand to buy him a house. Smale sent him $500 via Venmo as a token of appreciation, and the follower recently posted the keys to his new home.
“I had to do a disclaimer: Don't ask us for money. We're not gonna buy your house,” Smale said. “But it's cool to see people that are doing crazy stuff for the brand, and for them to see that the brand is equally crazy and willing to do that kind of thing for them.”
