Craft beer brand Jubel teased BrewDog at Twickenham over the weekend, inviting punters to throw cups of the latter’s Black Heart stout down a toilet.
BrewDog last week unveiled plans to host blind tastings of its latest launch against Guinness ahead of the Six Nations matches on 4-5 February. However, Jubel claimed the brewer had “pinched” its idea by hiring the exact same resident’s driveway for its promotion as the fruity lager brand had for its own in November 2022.
“We had a bit of an off-piste idea for an activation back in November for the Autumn Internationals,” said Jubel CEO and co-founder Jesse Wilson.
“We knocked on doors leading up to Twickenham Stadium to find a resident who would rent us their driveway, and dished out thousands of cans to rugby fans from our Land Rover mobile bar.
“We posted about the activation across our social media channels and it got huge engagement – people loved the creativity behind the idea.”
Jubel followed up with the same resident in December to book the driveway for the Six Nations, and was told it was unavailable. Wilson later discovered that BrewDog had booked the driveway for its own promotion.
This inspired a “tongue-in-cheek” response from Jubel, which pitched up in front of the BrewDog activation at the Six Nations this weekend with a toilet and a cool-box full of Jubel cans, offering rugby fans who didn’t like BrewDog’s new beer the opportunity to pop it in the loo and swap it for a cold can of Jubel.
“BrewDog were livid with it. Rugby fans were loving it. ‘LooDog’ went down an absolute storm,” Wilson wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“It was a bit annoying that we’d put in the hard yards to find a creative way to activate with rugby fans, only for it to get pulled from under us because BrewDog got their chequebook out,” said Wilson.
“We were trying to think of a funny way to respond and came up with ‘LooDog’ after we’d had a few pints in the pub. I made the sign on PowerPoint, Emma [Reynolds, field marketing manager] found a toilet on a scrap heap, and the total campaign cost us less than £50.”
A BrewDog spokeswoman said: “These Jubel people are just trying to draw attention to themselves by saying outrageous things on social media and hoping journalists will turn it into priceless PR. It’s disgraceful. No brand is ever going to succeed with tactics like that.”
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