VICTORIA BITTER | BOONIE | 2006
Buy a beer, get a talking ex-cricketer delivered to your door / VICTORIA BITTER "BOONIE"
Buy a VB and you'd get a miniature figure of a real former cricket player delivered to your home, one that would start talking along with the TV broadcast. And they made 200,000 of them.
The problem
VB is a beer brand long loved by working people in Australia, and it has been a sponsor of cricket broadcasts. Rather than just putting its name on a sign, it was looking for a way to become part of the lives of the people watching the games.
The insight
They zeroed in on the fact that cricket broadcasts have a culture of watching alone at home while doing your own commentary. If they could send a character modeled on a great player from the 1980s and '90s, David Boon, into that moment, the very act of watching could become a VB experience.
The idea
They developed a talking figure modeled on David Boon called "Boonie," built with a mechanism that picked up on TV broadcast signals and spoke lines that sounded like replay commentary. They gave away 200,000 of these as part of the promotion. The following year, a figure modeled on the great English player Ian Botham, called "Beefy," joined in, and the two were rolled out as a brother duo timed to the Ashes series.
What happened
The campaign won a Gold Promo Lion at the 2006 Cannes Lions and a Yellow Pencil at the D&AD Awards. Independent research recorded high awareness, and it's also said to have brought back customers who had drifted away from the brand.
Afterthought
Here's the interesting part. A few years later, someone from Foster's reportedly reflected at a conference that the campaign may have helped create an atmosphere that made light of excessive drinking. It won awards, it got people talking, but I think it's a good thing when a company and an industry can look back later and say "that wasn't right." Boonie figures are apparently still being traded secondhand online to this day.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2006
