Brewing up a storm: WEST Beer, TRNSMT social, guerrilla/ambient, and PR - highjacking a hashtag for a weekend, on a budget.

What do you do if you’re a brewery with Scotland’s biggest music festival right on your doorstep but you can’t get your brand in there? You get inventive.

The objective was to gain postive brand exposure over the TRNSMT weekend, despite having no official connection with the event. I developed a campaign using guerrilla tactics, social media and PR to give us traction over the three day festival.

In the build up to the event I created hype on social that the brewery was doing some sort of huge giveaway - but what exactly was it? We would only reveal it the night before the festival through our own channels and on the day of the event, through an embargoed press release. The giveaway was thousands of guitars - but the catch was they were actually air guitars!

Branded guitar stands were dotted around the entrances and perimeter of the festival where punters could pick up there ‘free air guitar’ creating an online and sharable talking point.

This mischievous campaign boosted our socials massively, with an enormous increase in reach and engagement, potential ‘physical’ exposure to the 150k footfall over the weekend, multiple pieces of non-paid press coverage and the ability to join the #trnsmt conversation in a relevant and authentic way, over the three days as part of a brand awareness exercise.