Carling / Creature
We thought Carling should make more than just entertaining TV spots so we asked them very nicely if they wouldn’t mind us turning them into a kind of beer travel agency over the summer. Thankfully and somewhat surprisingly, they agreed. Thus Brighton or Barbados was born. The idea was simple, everyone pays £49 for a holiday. The catch is that they don’t know where they are going. Three hundred randomly selected people flew off to Barbados in a Carling branded plane while seven hundreds others were whisked away to Brighton.
The holidays we gave away were all scheduled for the May bank holiday so we devised a poster campaign encouraging people to do away with their normal, boring, bank holiday plans and do something a bit more adventurous instead. The photos were shot on location in South Africa and although they may look serene, they were actually taken during a hurricane.
Our TV spot addressed the same issue of making a boring bank holiday more exciting. This time a malevolent seagull steals our Carling man’s chips, kicking off an a over the top, James Bond style chase scene across a pier. As usual our hero’s triumph is short lived, this time because he finds himself heading out to sea on a fishing trawler, albeit with chips in hand.
Over 30,000 people we’re queued up on the website on sale day, causing the site to crash momentarily but the holidays still sold out within three minutes. We kept our customers on edge by waiting three days before announcing their destination which we did using a spinning Brighton/Barbados postcard to reveal their holiday.