Last year I was part of a team that launched the first ever Beer Marketing Awards in the UK. The competition, and the event, was a great success, and the awards are now open for a second year.
There are two main ideas and ambitions behind the awards:
- Rightly, there are a great many awards for beer quality. That’s as it should be. But there’s no point making great beer if no one knows about it. With 1700 breweries now in the UK, it’s never been more important to make your beer stand out and let people know about it. At a time when some beer promotion is dodgy to say the least, we want to celebrate the best, and hopefully inspire the rest to do better.
- Marketing is seen by some as the preserve of big brewers, but everyone does it in some way. What you call your beer, what you put in the label or pump clip, how you tell pubs about it, what you say about it on social media, all of it counts. These awards are not just about big budgets: our ambition last year was to have the world’s biggest brewers competing with the UK’s smallest on a level playing field. In categories such as social media and packaging, they did, and the gongs went to the best ideas rather than the biggest budgets. There’s a category that suits any brewer of any size. We want this to be an event that could bring the whole industry together.
We’ve slightly rejigged and expanded the categories this year. Here’s a full list:
- BEST ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN – PRINT
- BEST ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN – BROADCAST
- BEST ONLINE COMMUNICATIONS
- BEST PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGN
- BEST BRANDING/DESIGN
- BEST USE OF COMPETITIONS
- BEST INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN
- BEST STUNT/GUERRILLA MARKETING
- BEST BUSINESS TO BUSINESS CAMPAIGN
- BEST INNOVATION
- BEST NEW LAUNCH
- BEST USE OF SPONSORSHIP
- BEST USE OF MERCHANDISE
- BEST EVENT
And two special awards at the discretion of the judges:
- OUTSTANDING INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENT
- OVERALL WINNER: BEER MARKETER OF THE YEAR
You can see a bit more description of the categories here, and download an entry for for any of these categories here. If you’d like to see the spread of winners from last year, who represent all corners of the British brewing industry, check them out, and learn why they won, here.
One criticism we received about the awards last year is that we charge for entry. We appreciate that small brewers don’t have much money to spend, but we’re a small start-up too with no external financial backing, and we need to make the event cover its costs. We have to charge something, but this year we’ve introduced a staggered entry costs along the same lines that our friends at Craft Beer Rising use to charge exhibitors:
- £60 (£50 + £10 VAT) for brewers under 5000 hectolitres
- £144 (120 + £24 VAT) for brewers between 5000 hectolitres and 60,000 hectolitres
- £180 (£150 + £30 VAT) for brewers over 60,000 hectolitres
We’re delighted to welcome Boutique Beers by Matthew Clark back as our headline sponsor. If you’re a brewer, client or supplier to the brewing industry who would be interested in sponsoring a category, drop me a line.
Entries are now open. The deadline for submitting them is 22nd February 2016. The Awards ceremony takes place in Brick Lane on 14th April 2016.
Good luck!
Your such a douche bag, you are one ignorant so of a bitch. Hope you sink on the ship you sail in
Anon
It's "you're." And I think you mean "Son of a bitch."
Glad you're having a nice, boozy pre-Christmas weekend but go steady, OK? You don't want to peak too soon and I'd hate for you to get carried way and do or say something that makes you look like a complete and utter dick – something we all have to be careful of at this time of year. Stay safe. x
Pete,
I hope you, and everyone on board the ship you're currently sailing in, have a splendid Christmas. And stay safe yourself: probably best parking up somewhere near the lifeboats.
John