Fools gold: Brewdog hid 50 cans made of what it claimed was solid gold for customers to find
Brewdog’s boss has paid out almost £500,000 to winners of its misleading ‘solid gold’ beer can competition.
In a 2021 promotion, the beer maker hid 50 cans made of what it claimed was solid gold for customers to find, which chief executive James Watt said was ‘inspired by Willy Wonka’.
But the Brewdog cans were gold plated, which is far less valuable and this led to a string of complaints.
The UK advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), banned the ad for being misleading.
In a post on Linked In, titled ‘A £500,000 mistake. Made by me’, Watt revealed that he has paid out £470,000 in total to the original can winners.
He said that ‘so carried away in the excitement of the project that I made some costly mistakes’ with the main one being that he falsely thought the cans would be solid gold after misunderstanding how they would be made.
He wrote: ‘The Gold Can saga was headline news. We were made to look dishonest and disingenuous and we took a real hammering online and in the press. Deservedly so. My initial tweets had been misleading and we deserved the flak. What was looking like one of the best campaigns in our history was now, decidedly, the worst.
‘This was my mistake and mine alone and it was on me to fix it. I had to find a way to make things right without the business to be punished for my error. So, I did something pretty radical.
‘I got in touch with all 50 winners and let them know that if they were unhappy with their prize I would personally offer them the full cash amount as an alternative. Furthermore, I promised to fund this myself so the business did not have to suffer financially from my mistake.
‘All in all, it ended up costing me around £470,000 – well over 2 and a half years’ salary.
‘Those were 3 very expensive mistaken tweets that I sent out in my enthusiasm for our new campaign.
‘It was a damaging episode for us and I am now the proud owner of 40 gold cans. Not quite sure what I should do with them. All Ideas welcome!’
Winners of Brewdog’s ‘solid gold cans’ complained they were gold-plated
When complaints over the promotion emerged, This is Money spoke to a competition expert about the Brewdog gold can prizes and asked their view.
Jeremy Stern, chief executive of prize specialists at PromoVeritas, said: ‘This is a case of an excellent creative concept being let down by sloppy execution.
‘The first mistake was to describe it as solid gold. It clearly was never going to be solid, given the volume of a can, if it was solid it would weigh an awful lot and be easy to spot amongst your regular shopping.’
He added: ‘What they might have meant was that, although hollow, it was still made of gold. But again that would have been impractical.
‘Gold is a soft metal and would never have been able to hold its shape as a can. Hence why the tool a regular aluminium can and gold plated it.
‘The second mistake was putting a value on the can, “£15,000”. It turns out that the valuation was based not on the pure value of the gold but on the uniqueness of the piece and its collectability. In much the same way that a painting is not the value of the ink on the canvas. However this was not made clear in the marketing.’
This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk
