Your Cousin from Boston is going to the Super Bowl.
Boston Beer Company is investing in a Super Bowl spot that will run during the big game on February 7 in the New York and Boston markets to help boost the reincarnation of its New England IPA brand as Wicked Hazy.
Speaking to Brewbound, Boston Beer CMO Lesya Lysyj called the Super Bowl the kickoff for the Wicked line — which includes Wicked Hazy and the rebranded Sam ’76 as Wicked Easy. Both beers began rolling out in retail stores nationwide this week.
Spots will also stream nationally via Yahoo and Verizon during the game, as well as on the CBS pregame broadcast. The ad was created by San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners.
Although Anheuser-Busch InBev maintains exclusivity over national ad space for beer ads as the game’s official beer sponsor, other beer companies can make regional ad buys.
Last year, Boston Beer and Molson Coors each made regional ad buys, with the former pushing Truly Lemonade Hard Seltzer, which became one of the top innovations of 2020 and Truly’s best-selling pack in off-premise retailers, and the latter pushing the now defunct Saint Archer Gold brand.
Although Lysyj declined to reveal too many details about the forthcoming spot, she said a teaser will come on Sunday, January 31.
As such, Boston Beer is investing 40% more in the first half of 2021 on the Samuel Adams brand than it did in 2020.
“All of that is Wicked,” she said. “So it’s a big commitment for us.
“It’s our big bet for the year.”
Between Wicked Hazy and Wicked Easy, the former is likely Boston Beer’s lead brand for the brand family, as the Super Bowl ad buy shows.
“We’re hearing 20 case displays, they come back a couple days later and they’re all sold down,” she said of the early returns. “Hazy is the bigger idea, I think, because it’s the IPA play. We haven’t done IPA in a big way ever really. I mean, we did New England IPA, but it wasn’t really a big launch. So it’s hard to tell, but I think Hazy will probably be the bigger the bet.”
The last time Boston Beer made a major play into the IPA space was the launch of Rebel IPA in 2014, but four years later, the brand was no longer a national offering.
Boston Beer’s Cousin campaign will also factor in heavily throughout 2021, for the Wicked line, Boston Lager, Summer Ale and other properties within the Samuel Adams brand family.
“We’re getting a lot of positives and we don’t have hardly anybody who hates him,” Lysyj said. “There was like 2%, of people who hate him. So we’re getting a lot of positives. So it’s good.
“It’s kind of like when a good series starts, the first season is pretty good but then it gets better and better,” she continued. “The stuff we have coming this coming year we’re really happy about. He gets into a lot of mischief.”
As for the future of the Wicked line, the company could expand the brand family, possibly with a double IPA (MyBeerBuzz unearthed a label for Wicked Double Hazy Juicy Double NEIPA), if consumers embrace the Wicked line.