As Good as Gold? BrewDog CEO Personally Pays out Over $500k After Gold Beer Can Promotion Fiasco
BrewDog’s gold can campaign started in Nov. 2020 (Photo: James Watt/Twitter)
A campaign to sell more beer ended up going very wrong for one of the biggest craft beer producers. After being accused of creating a misleading campaign, the BrewDog CEO, James Watt decided to pay each of the winners using his own money.
“Inspired by Willie Wonka” the first round of BrewDog gold can competitions started in late 2020. The brand promised to hide 24-carat gold cans inside cases of BrewDog beer. Although, fans were not happy to discover that the cans were not in fact, “solid gold” which is what Watt tweeted out to the world.
“I falsely thought the cans were made from solid gold when they were indeed only gold plated. In my enthusiasm, I had misunderstood the process of how they were made and the initial tweets I sent out told customers of the prospect of finding ‘solid gold cans’. It was a silly mistake and it only appeared in around 3 of a total of 50 posts about the promotion but as it turns out, those 3 tweets were enough to do a lot of damage.”
It appears the tweets mentioning the solid gold cans have since been deleted.
The original tweet, which The Guardian saved, read, “10 solid gold Punk IPA cans are hidden in Punk 12-packs which will ship from our online shop over the next 4 weeks. Winners receive a gold can worth £15K, £10k of BrewDog shares & VIP tour of our Brewery.”
As reported by The Guardian, fans like Mark Graig bought cases of BrewDog’s flagship beer, Punk IPA in order to find one of the gold beer cans. Many of the people, like Craig, just wanted the gold.
“I can’t imagine a similar frenzy for a novelty can, which is what it ended up being,” said Craig.
Initially, Watt announced the refund on Oct 20, 2021. In a tweet, Watt said, “Further to the gold can stuff, this was my mistake & because I don’t want my mistake to cost our company, team or shareholders anything I am funding the cash alternative for the original 28 winners.”
According to this most recent announcement, the number of winners ended up being 50 with 40 people reportedly taking the money.
Watt said, “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.”
When converted, the total is about $572,000, which is a very expensive mistake indeed.
In addition to the gold can fiasco, the brand recently got into hot water from a campaign that jokingly said their fruited beers counted as part of people’s five-a-day. They also received backlash the brand became the self-proclaimed anti-sponsors of the World Cup in Qatar.
Despite incidents like these, BrewDog will likely continue to push the boundaries of craft beer and the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK.
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