How guerrilla marketing and Will Ferrell are paying off for Old Milwaukee
More on that Old Milwaukee commercial that aired only in Nebraska… A grainy version of the video has received over half a million hits on the Youtube. The HD version is up on Deadspin.
Old Milwaukee managed to piggyback on the wave of Internet attention surrounding Super Bowl ads while ponying up a fraction of the traditional buy-in cost. Purchasing ad time during the Super Bowl is famously expensive. This year, according to NBC, the average 30-second national ad sold for roughly $3.5 million. In a market the size of North Platte, on the other hand, a 30-second TV ad maxes out at about $1,500, says Robert Passikoff, the founder and president of Brand Keys, a New-York brand-research consultancy.
via Businessweek.
These ads are pretty hilarious, especially if you’re a Will Ferrell fan. Apparently he’s doing these basically for free, so this works out pretty well for Pabst. It will only serve to increase the visibility of another “retro” brand. And really, the stuff is cheaper and probably about as good as the BMC stuff, so the big boys are getting undercut from another angle now, and that’s a good thing.