I hate to turn into Mr. Positive so shortly after joining the PostAdvertising.com crew, but companies seem to be getting more right than wrong recently. Either that, or I just keep tuning out those who mess up. Suckers.
The Foster’s Group, makers of the eponymous beer, has become one of those companies that gets it right. Even if Foster’s is more famous for its urinous flavor (yes, that’s a word, look it up) than good advertising, there are apparently some rather clever minds in the Foster’s ad department. Don’t buy it? Check out the Foster’s Scuba microsite. It features a game that lets you control a real live scuba device housed in a tank of Foster’s beer. It’s every 18- to 24-year-old male’s dream: a video game about beer. Now if only they could have thrown some tits in there...
In all seriousness, the Foster’s Group has nailed its target demographic. We love interaction. We love games. We love innovation. We love the Internet. And let’s be frank: we really, really love our booze.
When the Foster’s Group was figuring out how to advertise its new, hopefully flavor-improving Foster’s Scuba, the company obviously took those facts into consideration. After all, it’s tough to get a bunch of twenty-somethings excited about a weird, plastic doohickey that makes the bubbles in beer smaller. But if you let us control the doohickey and pop the bubbles ourselves, thus illustrating how it works, we’re hooked.
With this in mind, the Foster’s Group set up a giant tank of beer, filled it with bubbles and stuck in a miniature scuba device controllable over the Internet. The game somehow keeps track of your score based upon the number of bubbles you pop, and there’s even a high score leaderboard that’s unsurprisingly filled with crazies who somehow doubled the best score I managed to get. The entire campaign is a big bag of awesome, despite the impossibility of making the device rocket out of the water like a missile.
Seriously, I tried that shit for, like, ten minutes. It’s just not possible.
The Foster’s Group gets it. Its site actually made me want to give the terrible beer another shot, because, hey, maybe that little doohickey actually works.