Last week’s announcement that Anheuser-Busch InBev is in discussions with U.S. agencies about its Shock Top wheat beer brand has no impact on the beer’s Canadian AOR relationship with Anomaly Toronto, says partner and CEO Franke Rodriguez.
“It is not impacted at all,” Rodriguez told Marketing. “Our Shock Top Canada clients couldn’t be happier.”
Rodriguez said Anomaly Toronto is currently developing a new Canadian campaign for the brand that is built around a “totally different” strategy from its U.S. counterpart.
AdAge.com reported last week that Shock Top is having discussions with “leading creative agencies” as it plans for 2017, with Shock Top vice-president Jake Kirsch stressing it wasn’t a formal creative review “as we haven’t had a creative AOR for some time.”
Anomaly Toronto launched the Shock Top brand in Canada in 2014. The office also created a U.S. Super Bowl ad for Shock Top this year, but does not have a formal relationship with the brand in the U.S., said Rodriguez.
“We got a call from the Shock Top brand team in the U.S. [saying] ‘We have an amazing opportunity to do a Super Bowl campaign here in the U.S… It’s a short-term project with a really tight timeline, are you guys in?’
“We said absolutely,” said Rodriguez. “Any chance to work on a Super Bowl campaign, especially for an agency out of Toronto, is pretty cool.”
Anomaly Toronto did not hire additional staff for the Super Bowl campaign, said Rodriguez, instead used existing creative teams who work on the Budweiser, Bud Light and Corona accounts.
According to Rodriguez, that was the extent of the agency’s U.S. involvement with the brand. “We did it, we delivered that campaign, and then we were done,” he said.
AdAge.com reported Shock Top had previously worked with Anomaly’s sister agency 72andSunny, and the independent agency Group 360 in St. Louis.
