Ogilvy Australia

Client: Merivale
Product: Super Schooner Beer Glass
Title: Super Schooner
Media: N/A
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 18th November, 2020 - ongoing

Background: Australia went into national lockdown in March 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses across the nation were closed overnight, as the government attempted to halt the spread of the virus. Months later, as the rate of daily infections was consistently maintained at zero, restrictions started to lift, and eventually businesses such as pubs/bars were allowed to open to the public again. However, Australians were understandably a little slow to return to pubs/bars, as group interactions still made many people a little hesitant and nervous. Our client, Merivale, owns 70 licenced venues in Sydney, and our brief was to encourage consumers to come back to these establishments, especially in groups. Yep, our job was to normalise Aussies going back to the pub – a brief that would have seemed extremely redundant pre-COVID! How did we do this? By solving an age-old problem and particular pain point for many pub patrons.

Idea: The natural answer to the brief was enticing patrons back with discounts. However, pub owners had shut their venues for months, losing millions in revenue, so it was sub-optimal to ask them to take yet another financial hit. This also meant they didn’t have a lot of money for media budgets. Plus, traditional advertising just wasn’t the right tool for this job anyway. What were we going to say? “Please come back?” We needed an idea that would be cost efficient, and reach consumers via earned media, while also doing the crucial job of normalising ‘returning to the pub’. So, we created a product – not an ad. By designing the ‘Super Schooner’ - four beer glass that could easily be carried by one person, we had solved a common problem and created something of a talking point that got people back into the pubs and pondering their own beer inventions. The Super Schooner solved a very real problem – carrying the elusive fourth glass – a feat most people couldn’t manage. In partnership with industrial design team Vert Design, we created four interlocking glasses, each 425ml – the size of a schooner glass, and standard drinking size in Australia, that was perfectly balanced whether empty or full. When combined, the faces have a slight splay so as you lift them they lock in together and the geometry of them pushes down into your hand, making them very secure to carry – whether as all four, or even just three or two segments. It was also important for the combined glasses to ‘read’ as a schooner, to give people the context that allows people to know how to consume it. Of course, the Super Schooner also had the correct nucleation point, crucial in making the beer taste just the way it should.

Results: Almost immediately after its release, The Super Schooner gained international attention online and became a favourite topic for Aussie news outlets and radio stations for days on end and had an organic reach of almost 19 million on Facebook alone. Our Super Schooner also sent the subtle message to punters that socialising in groups was OK again. By being a product that was overtly for “group consumption” (ie: 4 beers), we not only let people know it was OK to go back to the pub again – we gave drinkers (without giant hands!) a real motivation to do so. Our idea had smashed expectations from a cultural impact standpoint while also helping Lion Nathan and Merivale to achieve more on-tap beer sales, which was one of the key factors to hit from the brief as on-tap beer provides greater profit than its bottled cousin.