EightBlack.

I had an interesting chat with Paul Gardner this week.

Paul is the Group Chairman of Grey Global, part of the WPP Empire.

More disturbing for me, a die hard Collingwood supporter, is that Paul is also the President of the Melbourne Football Club.

And the Pies had just happened to get flogged by Melbourne this week and I was not relishing the thought of sitting down with their President.

There’s just something about Melbourne supporters and their demeanour.

Playing against Melbourne, and then getting beaten by them is sort of like a prostate exam. You know you’ve got to do it but shit it hurts.

Anyway, we got talking about beer, which is a pretty good subject to dwell on if you ask me.

The topic of the Fosters “Big Ad” came up.

Apparently, the inside scoop within Fosters is that while it may be a great piece of creative (and it went viral by mistake) the simple fact of the matter is that it didn’t sell much beer.

But the Boonie doll?

Holy crap did that shift some product.

Some smart marketing folks - either within Fosters or their agency, came up with the concept that people could get a talking doll of the famous cricketer David Boon.

The guy looks like a dim sim with legs.

Legend has it that he still holds the world record for the most amount of beer consumed on the Kangaroo route (the Australia to London) flight on Qantas.

Fosters promoted the “Boonie Doll” and gave it away with every purchase of a slab of VB beer, the beer for the working class.

Now VB doesn’t need much help when it comes to being consumed.

It is already the number one beer sold in Australia, with one in every 4 beers sold in this country being a VB of some sort.

But when Fosters started this campaign, they nearly drowned in their own product.

More than $4 million dollars worth of these silly little dolls (which are about the same size as the real David Boon) were given away.

And the only way you got one, is to purchase a slab of VB.

Now that’s a lot of beer.

And it just goes to show that while the Big Ad is a great piece of creative and was extremely viral in nature, sometimes, the secret ingredient can be as silly as an ex cricketer who looks more like he swallowed a keg rather than a high end celebrity.

Power to the people I say.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 16th, 2006 at 7:22 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.