The Brief

Cheers! is a brand created by NZ's major alcohol producers - to make it easier for all (18+) New Zealanders to drink alcohol responsibly and make better choices. Our brief was to establish the brand to New Zealand – as a new and different voice that was more relevant and engaging to New Zealander drinkers than government sponsored campaigns that delivered the usual advice – and weren't listened to. Our strategy was to create less talk – and more action – using the power and reach of the alcohol industry to drive real changes in the way NZ drinks.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

All NZ health, alcohol and road safety advice is based on ‘Standard Drinks’ – the alcohol your body can process in one hour. But very few Kiwi’s know how much a 'standard drink' actually is… a bottle? A pint? So they don't know how many they’ve really had. So we turned a confusing measurement, into a simple product – Cheers! Standard Glasses, containing 1 standard drink of beer or wine. An initial production run was made available to venues and drinkers all over NZ - with the aims of generating media coverage, and demonstrating real public support for our product.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

The Standard Glass launched to immediate attention – with over 2 million media impressions on launch day alone. Nationwide coverage – across both news and social media – exhausted our entire production run in a matter of hours. So we pulled our advertising – to produce more glasses. By the day's end, they'd gone too. Over 10,000 Standard Glasses were claimed in the first day alone - with traffic to ‘cheers.org.nz’ increasing 50 times over. We’d created national awareness, and shown real demand for our approach. And with Standard Glasses continuing to be adopted by companies and venues across NZ, our results are just beginning.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Rather than attempting to engage an indifferent audience with messaging or advice, we put the solution directly into their hands - bypassing ignorance and apathy, with a solution that was perfectly targeted to alcohol drinkers, easy to adopt, and had high interest / talkability. Our campaign didn't lecture or preach - it just made our audience's nights better by making simple choices - such as whether to drive, when to pace yourself, and so on – much easier. For a drinker using our product, one drink really is one drink – so knowing how many they’ve had, couldn’t be simpler.