A single newspaper ad for Clancy’s Amber Ale was so effective, says the director of marketing who commissioned it, that for months after it appeared, consumers were able to recall the execution unaided.

Without prompting

Bruce McKay, director of marketing at Halifax-based Moosehead Breweries, makers of Clancy’s Amber Ale, says surveys conducted by company staff within a few weeks of the product’s June 1993 launch showed people knew about the ad and could remember it without prompting.

‘The pure recall was what really impressed us, the fact that they could remember seeing the ad,’ McKay says. ‘It was literally being talked about on the streets.’

Tom Russell, account director at Harrod & Mirlin, the Toronto-based agency that created the Clancy’s campaign, says that months later, during focus groups conducted to test the effectiveness of a variety of Moosehead Breweries ads against different target segments, it was the Clancy’s newspaper ad that participants mentioned time and time again.

‘We’ve got a strong television, radio and outdoor campaign out there, and people are volunteering information about the newspaper ad they had seen the one time, some months earlier,’ Russell says.

‘So, it had obviously made quite a big impression,’ he says.

The newspaper ad in question runs over two full pages, but instead of facing each other, as they would in a double-page spread, the pages are back-to-back.

On the first page, a right-hand page, the reader is confronted with a rectangle full of what looks like amber-colored beer complete with air bubbles.

There is no headline. The only copy appears at the bottom of the photo, where an instruction reads, ‘Hold this page up to the light.’

On the second page, which forms the back of the first page, is printed a message about Clancy’s Amber Ale.

The message is printed backwards on the second page to appear correŒŒctly when the ad is held up to the light and the words on the second page show through the amber-colored rectangle on the first page.

The words that appear include the headline: ‘Clancy’s Amber Ale. The Colour of Smooth.’

The copy says, ‘You’re looking through the smoothest colour of beer. Clancy’s Amber Ale.

‘Using only the finest quality ingredients and no preservatives, this real ale is brewed in small batches and aged naturally, never rushed.

‘The result is a true amber colour with a taste that’s surprisingly smooth.’

Logo

The ad is anchored with the Clancy’s logo.

The reason the ad was so memorable, ventures Brian Harrod, the creative director who came up with the idea, is because it invited readers to become involved in discovering the brand proposition – the color of smooth – for themselves.

‘This dramatizes the promise of the product – the rich color, the smooth taste and the connection of the two – in a memorable and involving way,’ Harrod says.

McKay agrees.

‘It was a very clever, very different idea,’ he says. ‘People were caught by the trick, and they got the message.’

The creative for all media used in the launch – tv, outdoor, newspaper, even radio – hinged on the beer’s rich color and smooth taste.

‘We didn’t want people to think that the richer color made it too strong,’ Harrod says. ‘So, therefore, it became a case of connecting the smoothness, which is something you look for in a beer, with the color.’

‘We wanted to take advantage of the difference we had with the beer, and that was clearly the color,’ McKay says.

‘So, the question was, and we take this approach with every newspaper ad we do, `How do we involve the consumer?’ he asks.

‘It’s not enough to simply shout a message at them. We want them to spend a little time with the ad.’

Asked how he came up with the idea, Harrod describes the process as ‘very loosey-goosey.’

‘The temptation was just to use a huge swatch of color, along with the headline, `The colour of smooth.’ But once we had that down, it wasn’t memorable enough. We had to go further.’

Harrod says the idea evolved in a discussion about the color.

Once the creative team, which consisted of Harrod, copywriter Brent Peterson and art director Jamie Way, had settled on the see-through-the-page idea, it became a matter of selling it to the client.

‘A lot of clients would say, `Who is going to take the trouble to hold it up to the light?’ Thankfully, they had the balls to do it,’ Harrod says. ‘And it worked.’

The execution demanded that Moosehead buy two full pages where one would normally suffice, to pay extra for color, and to trust in newspaper’s color reproduction capabilities – all things clients are generally reluctant to do, says Fiona Gallagher, the agency’s media director.

As well, it presented some interesting challenges for the newspapers involved.

‘One thing that seems obvious, but isn’t, is that side B ran on the page backwards,’ Gallagher says.

‘A lot of people touch the ad as it goes through the production process, and we had to work with the papers to ensure that everybody would know that that was okay,’ she says.

‘Because their first instinct would have been, `Oh, that’s backwards.’ ‘

Luckily, she says, she had the full co-operation of the newspapers involved.

‘It’s so great when you can take breakthrough creative ideas to a newspaper and they embrace those ideas and make them happen,’ says Gallagher, who was effusive in her praise of the Maritime newspapers involved.

‘They are basically giving you guaranteed fixed positions, and they have to be exactly back-to-back and lined up,’ she says.

‘It causes a lot of headaches to do this, because the paper is being put together in the space of a few hours, and things are always changing as new ads come in and editorial is moved around.’

Fortunately, Gallagher says, everything went without a hitch.

The ad appeared last June in both Halifax daily newspapers, The Chronicle-Herald/Mail Star and The Halifax Daily News.

In Sydney, n.s., it ran in The Cape Breton Post.

In New Brunswick, the brand launched in October in The Fredericton Gleaner, The Moncton Times Transcript and The Saint John Telegraph Journal/ Evening Times Globe.

Gallagher admits that when judged purely on the basis of cost per thousands reached (cpms), the Clancy’s newspaper ad was not as efficient as other executions the agency has placed for Moosehead.

But it provided plenty of bang for the buck.

‘The Clancy’s campaign wasn’t terribly efficient on a straight cpm because we bought a lot of space,’ Gallagher says.

‘We bought back and front, we bought full pages, we bought color,’ she says. ‘But, in terms of impact, it sure worked hard for us.’

As far as the media strategy was concerned, Gallagher says the role of newspaper in support of the launch was simple: to reach as many people in as short a period of time as possible.

‘Immediacy was the primary goal,’ she says. ‘tv, radio, outdoor – all those media will help you get that reach. But newspaper gets it in a day.’

‘Magazines are very slow. Outdoor and tv will build their reach in four weeks, and, for most campaigns, that’s fine.

‘But if you want trial to start in the first couple of weeks that you are out there, something that gives you in one day, 60% to 65% of your market reach, newspapers are great.’

Russell says a secondary objective with the newspaper ad was to communicate with the trade – the bars and restaurants that were going to sell the beer – and the salesforce that was going to promote it.

‘Certainly, we were interested in getting the licensees excited about a new product, and we wanted to excite the salesforce so they would get behind the brand,’ he says.

For McKay, the editorial environment of newspapers offered the brand a chance to make ‘news.’

‘There is really no other medium that affords you the opportunity to create news, than a newspaper,’ he says.

‘If you think of all the other mediums, they tend to build, and people realize the ads are there, but they don’t have the same kind of announcement value.’

‘When people see an ad in the newspaper, they say, `This is new, this has arrived, this is something I haven’t seen before.’ Newspaper works very well for us in that regard.’

McKay says that newsy tone was vital if the brand was to survive, adding, a large part of the beer season is from the May 24 to Labor Day weekends.

‘If a beer doesn’t hit the critical threshold within a six-to-eight week timeframe from the launch, if it doesn’t gain a large percentage of the trail, it just isn’t going to make it,’ he says. ‘It’s not like packaged goods at all.’

According to McKay, about 20% of the market, typically the young male drinker, will try a new beer no matter what it is.

As a result, there is lots of competitive jockeying for that segment of the market.

McKay says whatever brands make the greatest impression during those first crucial weeks of the beer season are usually the ones that are most successful.

Against the original set of objectives, which McKay says was to capture a significant share of that 20%, the brand did not perform as well as he had hoped.

But Clancy’s penetrated a segment that is much more difficult to convert – the 80% of beer drinkers that tend to be brand-loyal.

And it did that in an intensely competitive environment.

Overall, he says the brewery was pleased with the campaign because the Clancy’s creative broke through the clutter and helped the beer find its own audience – an older, better educated, and more stable consumer than the target originally aimed for.

Asked whether he would use newspaper for any subsequent campaigns now that he knows the brand’s target audience is older and better educated, and, therefore, more likely a newspaper reader, McKay says that would depend on the campaign’s communications objectives.

‘In general, we use newspaper as an announcement vehicle,’ he says.

‘If there are things that are newsworthy about the brand – if we have product information, or something new to say about the brand – then newspaper fits that role very well.’

‘To put a purely creative idea in newspaper, and this is my personal opinion, I’m not sure it works as effectively for us as other media.

‘But, again, that’s a personal opinion, and that’s respecting the fact that we use different media in different ways.’

As far as Harrod is concerned, he laments the dearth of great creative in Canadian newspapers.

‘They are undervalued creatively,’ he says.

‘A newspaper page can provide a wonderful opportunity to use white space.

‘And it’s a lovely size – they are so much bigger than your average magazine. And newspaper color right now is pretty damn good, so it must be the cost.

‘Media people keep talking about it being a game of inches – whether you reach that target group for that cost.

‘It’s all very well to measure who reads it, but, like any medium, if you use it creatively, it can be incredibly effective.’