Labatt is playing up the Pacific Northwest roots of its Kokanee beer brand as part of its biggest push ever into the Western U.S. market.

A series of eight radio spots and three television spots, by Bryant, Fulton & Shee, are set to air this month in Seattle and Spokane, Wash., and later this summer in Oregon, says Scot Keith, account supervisor with the Vancouver-based agency.

The humorous television spots feature actual employees of the Columbia Brewery where Kokanee is brewed in the small town of Creston, B.C. The Columbia Brewing Co. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Labatt Breweries of Canada.

The radio spots use humour as well, with characters trying to keep Kokanee a secret since there is only a limited supply of the beer being exported to thirsty Americans.

‘There is a certain cachet to being a Canadian beer company,’ says Bryan Semkuley, director of Canadian brands for Labatt USA in Norwalk, Conn. ‘There’s even more cachet to brewing the beer here in the Pacific Northwest.’

Both the television and radio spots will air in moderate weight throughout the summer, after which they will be evaluated for the fall, he says.

The radio spots are new, but the television commercials originally aired in B.C. nearly five years ago, says Keith.

‘With just a little tweaking, we were able to adapt the spots for the U.S. market,’ he says.

This is the largest marketing push of the Kokanee brand in the U.S. since it was launched in 1994, says Semkuley. When the brand was first introduced in Alaska, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Idaho, Labatt did limited radio advertising. Sporadic follow-up spots also aired in Seattle and Spokane last year, he says.

An aggressive retail and on-premise promotional campaign has helped Kokanee double its volume of sales nearly every 18 months, Semkuley says.

Labatt is targeting U.S. consumers who want something a notch above standard American domestic beer like Budweiser, but don’t want to stray too far from the mainstream into European imports or microbrewery products, he says.

‘Canada has a good reputation for beer in the U.S. and people are willing to pay a little extra for it,’ he says.

The brewery’s flagship brand, Labatt Blue, has recently overtaken Molson Canadian to become the third-largest imported beer in the U.S., behind Corona and Heineken.

Labatt is hoping to see the same success with Kokanee in the U.S. that it has had with the brand in B.C. For the past 10 years, Kokanee has been the most widely consumed beer brand in the province.

The U.S. spots are not the only old Kokanee creative being given new life on the West Coast. To celebrate Kokanee’s 40th anniversary, Labatt is reprising 14 of its ‘classic’ Kokanee commercials from the past 15 years.

Labatt is airing everything from ‘Brew the Dog’, who fetches his master a Kokanee beer, to its Sasquatch-hunter spots to its current Kokanee Mountain Patrol.