Harbin Beer has launched a series of ultra-short ‘football-themed’ TV spots leveraging Anheuser-Busch InBev’s World Cup sponsorship rights.
Harbin is China’s oldest beer brand and along with premium positioned Budweiser is one of two core AB InBev’s brands in China, the world’s largest beer market.
Harbin, the official World Cup beer brand partner in China, is running these Brazil 2014 mini-videos every night on CCTV1 news.
The campaign us further supported through OOH media and it aims to reach hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers.
The short duration of the ‘blipverts’ ensures that creative agency BBH China, which only won the Harbin beer account in November 2013, has kept each one simple by sticking to a single football theme or element per spot.
For example, ‘Rivals’ features dual branded bottles representing host nation Brazil and heavyweight regional opponent Argentina.
Other ads in the series focus on simple, basic elements of the game, such as ‘Red Card’,
‘Slide Tackle’,
‘Penalty Kick’,
‘Mexican Wave’,
while the ‘Freedom Time’ spot revolves around a Harbin drinker ignoring a mobile call from the boss during the big game and instead using the phone as a beer mat.
Comment
There’s something clean, straightforward and admirable about the repetitive efficiency of the creative and the format.
The objective is to raise the brand’s profile in China and the brevity of the spots certainly helps them stand out from the crowd of lengthy spots typically aired in the market.
BBH China won the beer’s Chinese business, spanning brand strategy and integrated campaigns across the beer’s marketing and communications divisions, after a competitive review which saw them up against heavyweights Ogilvy, JWT and BBDO.
After winning the account, BBH China CEO Arto Hampartsoumian said: ‘This is an epic win for us. Working with Harbin Beer is indeed an incredible opportunity and challenge. We are deeply honoured to welcome this business to BBH.’
The Brazil 2014 work follows on from Harbin’s creative as the official beer in China associated with the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
This saw it become the first beer in China to partner with the FIFA World Cup.
This saw the AB InBev brand activate its 2010 South Africa rights with a Harmin TV spot (created by JWT, Shanghai) and a digital campaign starring soccer legend Ruud Gullit.
Gullit, who was Harbin’s brand ambassador for the beer’s 2010 World Cup sponsorship work, used the digital platform (developed by Aegis-owned Wwwins Consulting in Shanghai) to share soccer tips with Chinese football fans.
That campaign ran on heavyweight Chinese digital platforms such as Sina.com, Sohu.com and Tudou.com.
It also included fan contests offering players a chance to meet Gullit and win World Cup tickets.
As ever, campaign stats in China were huge. According to Allen Wang, business development director at Wwwins Consulting in Shanghai, just two days after the 2010 digital campaign launched it had racked up 543m impressions, 3m clicks and 1m page views.
Links
AB-InBev Website
Harbin Website
http://www.ab-inbev.com/go/brands/brand_portfolio/local_brands/harbin.cfm
