We are back in 2017 for the third year running to celebrate the best marketers and campaigns in the industry.

Not so long ago, TV ads were the main channel for building successful beer brands. Today, mass audiences are more fragmented and the medium is much more tightly restricted. Great ads are rarer now, but still possible. The judges in this category are looking for strong creative ideas that stand out, get talked about, and build powerful brand attributes. We also want to see some indication that the work has been effective, given its budget, without going into too much detail or econometric analysis.

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We all know that when we read print media ourselves, we turn the pages barely registering the ads. And yet, the vast majority of print campaigns consist of a pack-shot, logo, and if you’re lucky, a witty line. Magazine and newspaper advertising increasingly works in the same way as posters, and long body copy seems to be a thing of the past in a world with attention deficit disorder. We’re looking for work with the ability to make people stop and look, something that has an idea rather than just a picture of a beer.

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This is one of the most hotly contested categories in the awards. Are websites still relevant in a world of more dynamic social media platforms? Can you really be creative with a Snapchat or Twitter account? Here, we regularly see some of the world’s biggest brewers going head-to-head with the UK’s smallest. It’s free to open a Twitter or Facebook account, and if you have the knowledge and creativity, you can get greater awareness than someone with a six or seven figure budget. For their part, large scale marketers have realised that social media can’t just be left to those who can’t afford to do broadcast advertising – increasingly, people expect to genuinely engage with the brands they admire. Here we’re looking for work that genuinely engages drinkers and does something traditional media can’t do. We’re looking for engagement and two-way dialogue that builds relationships. That means thinking a little bit more carefully than simply sticking your TV ad on a Facebook page and measuring the number of ‘likes’ it gets. What do those ‘likes’ translate into? Where does it go from there? Again, we’re looking for campaigns that help build brands and relationships rather than simple awareness.

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The principle is very simple: an idea that’s so good, media outlets will choose to talk about it for free, rather than because you’ve bought advertising space for them. Public Relations has been defined as ‘the truth, well told.’ There’s a lot of fun to be had in defining what ‘well told’ means – grabbing people’s attention, making them stop and take note, and take away the right messages about the brand. Such initiatives can be large or small, big budget or no budget. But we’re looking for column inches and people talking about your idea, evidence that your creativity has caught the press and the public’s imaginations.

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This is the most hotly contested category in the short history of these awards, and is definitely one of the most fascinating for the judges. Like online, packaging offers more of a level playing field than most other categories. Ultimately everyone has the same space on a bottle label, can or pump clip. We’ve seen iconic identities develop over time that are instantly recognisable but resistant to change. Now, we have younger, smaller businesses seemingly breaking every rule in the design handbook to get noticed. We’re looking for bold, disruptive design – but it still has to work. It has to stand out and be clearly identifiable. And it has to make us want to pick up the bottle or can, or order from the font.

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While an integrated campaign spans several different channels of communication, the quality of entries we’ve seen so far demonstrates that it’s not about having a budget big enough to buy lots of different media – it’s about an idea that’s strong enough to run through various consumer touchpoints, consistently and relevantly, building a compounded brand meaning that takes on deeper levels of meaning and appeal from its spread across those touchpoints than if the whole budget had been spent in one medium. What does each channel add? How do the channels work together to enhance each other in a manner that increases awareness but also makes the message deeper? How does this specific idea benefit from multiple channels, and how does the idea executed across those particular channels help the brand more than a different approach would?

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Arguably an aspect of PR, a good stunt or cheeky guerrilla campaign can be so much more. If you don’t have the budget or the official rights to associate with some property, an ingenious idea can cur through the limitations. We’ve seen examples where guerrilla marketers at sporting events can be mistaken for sponsor who have paid millions. This is about hijack and subversion (while obviously staying within the law of course.) If you’ve done a campaign that meets these criteria, you’ll already know about it and you’ll already be writing your entry, because you won’t be able to help talking about it. Great brands can be created this way.

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Good old B2B is much maligned, the poor relation of the more glamorous categories here. Or at least, that’s the theory, anyway. When we’ve been involved in developing campaigns in the past, the ‘trade’ bit is often relegated to the end, a quickly thought-out message that uses the imagery of the main consumer campaign, tells your customers how much money you’re spending on that campaign (always grossly exaggerated) and reassures them that you are number one in your category (even if you have to come up with a very convoluted definition of what that category is before you can make that claim.) And yet, in the first year of the beer marketing awards, this was the most creatively vibrant category we had, and certainly the hardest to judge. When this was consolidated in our second year, we realise that good, imaginative B2B in this industry is often about giving publicans and retailers something of genuine value and really helping them. This isn’t philanthropic – it’s a way of ensuring loyalty, display, even creating spokespeople who will eulogise your brand to the consumer. Or maybe you’ve found yet another way of reinventing the discipline?

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Slightly changing your pantone reference is not innovation. Moving from a 500ml bottle to a 330ml bottle is not innovation. Launching yet another pale ale brewed with Citra, Centennial and Cascade hops is not innovation. Innovation is something which is not just new to the brand, but also new to the category, or at least to your target consumer. Pretty much every marketing guru agrees that innovation is a vital condition for brands and markets to move forward. That’s why many brands convince themselves that their tinkering is innovation. And it’s also why brands deluding themselves and attempting to delude others about this is so dangerous. If you convince yourself you’re breathing, or eating a healthy diet, but you’re not, you’ll die. There is so much genuine innovation in beer just now – more than there has ever been. Come show us yours, and set an example that the industry will talk about.

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This was a new category in 2016 and it was a shot in the dark for us. It was a hotly contested category and one that provoked fierce debate in support of each of the shortlisted entries. New beers and ciders are launching all the time, and are doing so into an incredibly crowded market that’s declining in volume. How do you get noticed? How do you get listed? A successful launch is a precarious balancing act: you need to raise consumer awareness, but at the same time you also need to get listings pretty quickly. Nothing kills a new launch faster than driving consumers to buy your product when no one is sticking it – except maybe getting big listings and then being dropped straight away because no one knows what your product is or why they should buy it. A good new launch is about disruption and noise – but also very careful and considered planning.

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It’s easy to do sponsorship – you pay someone a lot of money so they will allow you to plaster your logo all over whatever it is they do. But in doing so, it’s even easier to lose sight of how you’re presenting your brand to your target audience. Poorly thought through or aggressive sponsorship can actually spoil someone’s enjoyment of the thing being sponsored. The best sponsorships are synergistic relationships. Rather than just name awareness, the sponsoring brand builds positive image attributes by association. And in return, rather than just providing financial support to the thing being sponsored, a thoughtful sponsorship can create genuine value for the target audience by enhancing the experience or even creating new experiences that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. There’s more to life than logos.

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Traditionally this is another area that’s often doe with very little thought – find anything you can stick a logo on, any bit of old tat, and do it. Those branded T-shirts you give away on promos to bar staff? They give then to old regulars who wear them when they’re decorating or working on the car. But imagine a T-shirt that’s so cool bar staff are actually fighting to get hold of one. Imagine doing stuff that gets nicked by people who want to be seen with it, spreading your message. And imagine giving promotional kits to a bar that are so good they actually improve the look of the place when they’re installed. If you can imagine these things, why not create them?

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A new award for 2017, we felt it was time to celebrate some of the great work brewers and cider makers do above and beyond the drinks they make. This might be something around sustainability, the environment, helping the local community, or any other way of ‘giving something back.’ Of course you’re doing it for the warm feeling it gives you inside, but we’re looking for examples that help improve the image of the brand and/or the industry – not in an ‘atoning for your sins’ way, but a thoughtful, creative way.

Here at the Beer and Cider Marketing Awards, we’re all old enough to remember dealing with creative briefs that target the young male drinker. “There’s no point targeting women because they don’t drink beer.” “There’s no point targeting older people because when they get past forty they’re too set in their ways.” Well, we’re now all over forty, and at least one of us is a woman, and we beg to differ. We can point to a great many campaigns that have targeted women in a patronising manner, or have made the mistake that anyone over 40 is old enough to remember the war. We’ve introduced this new category for 2017 in the hope of inspiring entries that engage non-traditional drinkers (in the eyes of old marketing thinking at least) in inspiring and creative ways. It could be women, it could be older people, it could be other groups that aren’t normally associated with beer.

Every trends analyst we speak to tells us people today want to buy experiences rather than just products. We’ve seen countless brands sit in these presentations and nod, then go back to churning out ads that tell people to buy stuff rather than engaging them in events. Get up close to your drinkers in real ways and you can turn them into passionate advocates for your brand. We want to see people going beyond the norm, creating immersive brand experiences rather genuinely deepen relationships.

Previous winners

Previous winners

Previous winners