2020 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Challenges and Goals
SingleCut Beersmiths is a New York City craft brewery with fans in beer-loving cities around the world. Its founder’s two lifelong passions – brewing and music – came together when he sold his collection of vintage guitars in order to open SingleCut. The brewery is named for a style of guitar, its tasting-room tap handles are shaped like guitar headstocks and necks, and new product launches invariably reflect this passion for music.

SingleCut had the desire to expand not just in existing U.S. and Canadian markets, but also into Japan for the introduction of its new IPA and looked to that specific market for insight and inspiration to guide the product design and launch.

Insights and Strategy
The music scene in Japan is known for a unique phenomenon. Rock bands from North America and Europe often become big in Asia before they’re popular in their own countries. Bands like Queen and The Runaways achieved stardom in Asia long before North Americans even knew their names. The term for that phenomenon shaped the agency’s first recommendation. It named the beer “Big in Japan.”

While searching for other cultural phenomena unique to Japan, the shop found something that was familiar to people in North America but had another other level of meaning in Japan: QR codes. While they never became as popular in the west, QR codes are entrenched in daily life as a way to obtain information, order products and interact with brands in Japan.

Execution
Big in Japan’s packaging completely transformed QR codes from the usual format of black squares on a grid to a colourful, storytelling graphic, rewriting how consumers saw and interacted with the technology and demonstrating the brand’s connection to music in an unexpected and gamified way.

Four distinct QR codes were created as the central imagery of the packaging. Each code was a clue, a graphic representation of a classic rock song that presented drinkers with a musical puzzle to solve. People could try to solve it on their own or find the answers by scanning the QR code. When scanned, they were taken to a specially crafted Spotify playlist that solved the puzzle by playing the song and revealing the new IPA they were drinking.

Point-of-sale posters featured a fifth QR code that presented the story of Big in Japan IPA and of SingleCut. Scanning the codes unlocked an experience tailor-made for music lovers. The embedded clues alluded to everything from lyrical references to a band’s signature wardrobe. When consumers scanned a QR code, they were taken to the actual classic song on Spotify.

Results
Big in Japan’s content-driven approach delivered on SingleCut’s big ambitions. The campaign’s promoted social media assets garnered the highest level of consumer engagement to date for the brand, resulting in four times the usual response level. The playlists on Spotify received over 5,000 unique visits, more than three times the visits SingleCut’s website typically receives in the same time frame. This resulted in the beer selling out within two weeks of release – a first for the brand in such a short period of time.

Credits

Agency: Zulu Alpha Kilo
Chief Creative Officer: Zak Mroueh
Design Director: Ryan Booth
Art Director: Kevin Sato
Writer: Vinay Parmar
Creative Tech Director: Martin Szomolanyi
Account Team: Erin McManus
Strategic Planner/Digital Strategy: Spencer MacEachern, Stephanie Gyles
Agency/Integrated Producer: Houng Ngui, Teresa Bayley
Client (Company): SingleCut Beersmiths
Clients: Rich Buceta
Illustrator: Ty Dale, Kevin Sato
Studio Director: Greg Heptinstall
Production Artist: Anna Harju, Brandon Dyson, Ashleigh O’Brien
Animator: Andrew Martin