beer chase
I would be slightly disingenuous if I did not state that the following sticks in my craw somewhat, but Clems' new Carlton Draught spot, 'Beer Chase', is great.
However, if I was going to be picky (yes, I am) - and this was something I used to repeat during my time at the agency over and over - then I would pick on the following.
If one is making a movie, and therefore giving life to a story, then there's a lot of other stuff that needs to be considered.
Until there's a better word to describe this process then we are stuck with the term 'transmedia storytelling'.
If people connect with the content - and they are, at the time of writing the clip has racked up 1.8million views on You Tube - then it's a massive missed opportunity to not create a bigger story world.
For instance.
Who are these characters?
How did they end up in America?
What happened to the money?
What are the other concurrent narratives?
The spot ends with a point to the Carlton Draught website, perhaps this will be where more of the narrative is revealed? Nope.
For the previous Carlton Draught film 'Slo-Mo', I fought to have #carltondraught hashtag on the end, this was a new idea back in 2010 which has become the norm.
A #beerchase tag to prod for conversation would have been more appropriate than pointing to a static website where there is no extension.
While I was at Clems, Draught's long standing agency, we often mused that Carlton Draught had the potential to truly transcend the beer category and could be viewed more as an entertainment brand, one for which the beer was really a marketing mechanism for the overall cultural brand.
Like a Converse perhaps?
It's a cool bit of film, funny and bang on for the brand and no doubt an award certainty in the film bucket but I still believe there's a big opportunity for Carlton Draught to be a bigger iconic Australian brand if only they could be broken out of the category mindset.
