Beavertown’s brand bosses flesh out what went into its first-ever TV ad
We catch up with the brand’s marketing director, Tom Rainsford, and creative director, Nick Dwyer, to find out how the hell you get people to relate to skeletons.
It’s a big moment for Beavertown Brewery. After more than a decade in the business, the beer brand is making its first foray into TV advertising. Today, the Heineken-owned company has unveiled its new campaign, ‘For Humans and Other Social Beings,’ which features a bunch of skeletons chatting down their local pub, retelling stories to each other over a pint.
Ultimately, the decision behind the move is simple, according to Beavertown’s marketing director, Tom Rainsford: it wants more people to know about the brand and what it stands for.
Creative director Nick Dwyer, meanwhile, explains that it is a big change for the brewer: “For the first 10 years of our existence, we did, like, no marketing at all. After doing essentially three really big pieces of video work and animation, one of them being a music video from Queens of the Stone Age, this feels natural.”
Explaining his approach to the TV ad, he says: “The creative was really about bringing this quite strange, trippy world to life, but at the same time humanizing it because the whole point of the advert is not so much yelling about Beavertown but more yelling about how nice it is to be together and be social.”
The spot features folk sharing their most memorable “good night out” and is “almost a complete flip” in tone for the brand, says Dwyer. “What I usually do is try to be obnoxious; I try to jab and be a bit pokey with people, trying to get them to think, ‘Oh, that’s a bit strange.’ Whereas the flip side of that is us making this really gentle, which feeds into people’s emotions.”
That raw emotion comes through because each skull is based on a real person; street casting played a huge part in this campaign. To give it that Beavertown twist, the characters in the film were shot in live action first and then hand-drawn from there. Alice Bloomfield, the artist behind the animation, has a knack for capturing subtle nuances in people’s body language, which convey each character’s personality in spades.
Marketing director Rainsford explains: “Everyone’s got that story, so we asked people a very broad question: ‘Talk to me about the last great night out.’”
One of the stories retold in the film is about a hilarious trip to Scotland taken by two mates, while another is about a couple of mums who got a bit carried away on a night out. Beavertown takes those human truths and intersperses them in its visual world.
“We exaggerated the nice things about them, like if they had a bit of emotion in their shoulders,” says Dwyer. “It’s weird because we’ve made them less human and more human by making them skeletons.”
Rainsford adds: “The irony of this is we’re trying to capture the beauty of real people but dissolving it into existing skeletons, so it was all about the finer details.”
One standout detail from the ad is the array of different voices and accents, paired with the subtle wit and dry humor, the spot ending with a Scottish character getting a ‘frog in this throat’ and needing to take a sip of beer.
The campaign will run throughout the summer months across TV, digital, social and out-of-home. Beavertown plans to spotlight key characters from the ad across the various platforms, inviting people to engage and tell their own stories of brilliant nights out.