It was one small step for man, one giant leap for Moosehead.
The beer brand recently strapped a can of its Moosehead Dry Ice beer to a weather balloon and sent it to the lower edges of Earth’s atmosphere. The stunt, conceived and filmed by Extreme Group, served as the finale to the brand’s series of “product test” videos.
Prior to “Space Beer,” Moosehead exposed a can of Dry Ice to ultraviolet lights, placed another in an industrial paint shaker and sent a third tumbling across a trampoline. The point of each of the videos: to demonstrate in jest that Moosehead Dry is beer, no matter what you do to it.
After the weather balloon came down, the fictive hosts Extreme Group scripted for the series tracked it down and cracked the tab on the can to test it. (Spoiler: it was still beer.)
With its tagline “This Is Beer,” the campaign is a response to the proliferation of the beer market and the rise of flavoured and specialized beers. While other brands, including some in Moosehead’s portfolio, are offering more specialized varieties of beer than ever, the company elected to stay simple with its Dry economy brand, available exclusively in Nova Scotia.
“With every movement within the market comes an equal and opposite counter-movement,” said Ray Gracewood, senior director of marketing and sales at Moosehead. “Although there’s a lot of great and interesting things happening in the beer world, there’s still a lot of consumers [just] looking for a great beer at a great price.”
According to Gracewood, Moosehead Dry has been the leading economy brand in Nova Scotia for more than 15 years. This May it introduced two new varieties of Dry, Dry Light and Dry Ice (each retailing for $20.99), prompting the campaign to increase awareness for the new offering.
The media buy for the campaign, handled by Time and Space, targets Nova Scotia consumers and is focused on Facebook, where each of the six product test videos live. To date, the “Shaken Beer” video is the most popular of the series with almost 35,000 views.
