Beer Ape

In a presentation about award winning ads and multi-media campaigns Steven Mykolyn, Creative Director for Taxi, revealed an ad campaign for Rolling Rock Beer. Most if not all beer company's seem to take the comical approach to their campaigns and Rolling Rock did so as well. But what was different about theirs was that they came at it from an entirely different angle. The platform(big idea) behind the campaign was an apology.
They ran the first ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCtsmMVt_wA). After watching this one you can see that there are so many advertising rules broken in this it's almost hard to count them all. Many people getting drunk, beers being thrown, clear endorsement of heavy drinking and at the end the Ape jumps into a pool...with an electric guitar. So unconventional might be an understatement. Although this ad was funny on it's own the real campaign began with the next step.
In the next ad Ron Stablehorn, the "CEO/Spokesman" for Rolling Rock, sent out a public apology for the Beer Ape Ad (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtTwJxAQm1E). From there ads ran on websites apologizing. Blogs were set up for people the complain about the ad. Then they ran a revised Beer Ape Spot afterwards with slightly altered scenes and a new theme song. From then they generated an incredible amount of viral interest and by word of mouth Rolling Rock was being talked about everywhere.
The next phase was to launch a pre-emptive apology before running their ad during the SuperBowl (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scTbR_xhohY). The ad features men in the office wearing thongs. After this ad another ran called "Foul Ball" which features men getting hit in the junk with a baseball. Throughout the campaign Ron Stablehorn continued to apologize and maintained his role as the company's spokesman.
The campaign was innovative, hilarious, multi-faceted, and gave Rolling Rock a brand voice that they would have never imagined prior. This is definitely one of the best muti-media campaigns I have ever seen.