Budweiser Football Promo Goes Local

St. Louis -- Enjoying a cold beer while watching a good football game has long been a Sunday afternoon ritual for many football fans. And both on- and off-premise promotions touting Bud and Bud Light beers have been a mainstay for Anheuser-Busch Inc. during the fall football season. But this year, the company is doing things a little differently by targeting fans at the local level."What we're trying to do is get the NFL program down to the local level and really make an impact in each market," says Dan McHugh, director of sales promotions for the brewery. "What you're seeing from A-B is much more emphasis on local market sponsorship, which includes more team-specific P-O-P than we have ever done before."As the only major fall football promotion from the company other than its annual Bud Bowl, which is held around the Super Bowl in January, A-B has concentrated all of its marketing support on this effort. "We have more than $3 million worth of P-O-P that has been ordered against this program, which shows the impact of how much P-O-P is going out the door to support it," says McHugh. "The take rate on it has been very successful with both our wholesalers in the NFL markets as well as in entire states. Almost every wholesaler in the state of Texas, for example, will order Cowboy P-O-P. It's going over extremely well. About 95% of our wholesalers are participating in this program, and the 5% that aren't are probably in very rural areas. The best we ever do in a national program is 97% or 98% of our wholesalers participating, so the take rate for the NFL program is extremely high."This year's program carries the slogan "Because It's Football." As McHugh says, "Why do people paint their faces? Why are they so fanatical when it comes to game time? Well, it's because it's football." Both on- and off-premise locations across the country will feature a wide variety of the P-O-P created to support this massive marketing effort. "We really go across the board with the types of pieces we put out there --you'll see a little bit of everything," he says.Included in the program are more than 40 different generic P-O-P pieces that can be placed in markets without NFL teams as well as those with a home team. They feature pictures of fans and the collective use of all NFL team logos. Another 15 to 20 different P-O-P pieces were created for those areas with teams and are customized for each of the 31 teams in the league. The team-specific pieces include three-sided schedule table tents, slogan banners, schedule banners, imprintable banners, c-poles, stringer pennants, danglers and inflatables."The program will last through January or as long as each retailer is looking for it," says McHugh. "There is a heavy emphasis in August, September and October and then when the playoffs come around, the wholesalers might go in and refresh some of the P-O-P. We not only have team-specific P-O-P particularly for on-premise locations throughout the country, but we are the official beer for 'Monday Night Football,' so we produced 'ABC Monday Night Football' schedule banners that say 'Watch the Game here' and provide other information," he says. "This is a big program for the on-premise trade."Similar to past promotions, the program targets all football fans. As McHugh points out, "Our football program is very broad from a demographic standpoint." This year's materials are slightly different, however, because they put a focus on the contemporary adult, the 21- to 27-year-old. "That is a lot of the photography that you see in the images. We're incorporating more lifestyle/consumer imagery of the actual football fans," says McHugh. "Before we went after the thematic of football, but now we're zoning in on the fans with action shots of people tailgating and painting their faces."Stark Printing, St. Louis, produced a large majority of the paper P-O-P pieces, while Alvimar Manufacturing Co., Long Island City, N.Y., produced the inflatables. Continental Lithographing Co., Cleveland, and Forest Manufacturing Co., Twinsburg, Ohio, produced the banners.

Budweiser Football Promo Goes Local

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