The brand is an Australian cultural icon, boasting an engaged and loyal fan base. VB has successfully begun leveraging its iconic status beyond beer itself by creating a line of popular merchandise, collaborating with relevant Australian brands, and finding new ways to spark conversation amongst its audience. In late 2019, we were tasked with creating a campaign that would generate significant earned media for the VB brand. In doing so, it was vital to reinforce what the brand is all about, a reward for hard work.
Hard work often results in sweat and odour. While this is OK on the worksite, it is not so great at the pub for knock off drinks. Thus, VB Thirst was born, a fragrance designed for that knock-off moment and to help hard-working Australians smell as good as their ice-cold VB tastes. We partnered with Australia’s leading fragrance manufacturer (Game On Products) and retailer Chemist Warehouse to create and launch the product.
The integrated campaign saw us create a fragrance advert parody with comedian Harley Breen that was seeded out across brand, retailer and NRL channels. We leveraged VB’s NRL partnership extensively with everything from grass signage during Friday Night Football to content featuring James Tedesco.
PR was at the heart of the campaign with exclusives across news mastheads nationally, VNR packages provided to all media, tailored use of Harley for interviews, AFL and NRL talent plus specially created media kits to target outlets and influencers.
The most successful PR campaign CUB has ever run and the fastest selling Australian fragrance of all time. Across earned, owned and paid media the cumulative reach was over 20.5million resulting in 40,000 units sold (to date).
