Boston Beer Company is investing $5 million in Twisted Tea’s winter advertising campaign – more than five times what it spent in Q1 2021 — and introducing a winter-focused ad for the first time.
The company is launching two new commercials (15- and 30-seconds), playing off the brand’s “Tea Drop” campaign, which launched last summer and surprises “real Twisted Tea superfans sourced directly from the brand’s social channels” with an assortment of hard tea products and branded party supplies. The campaign is “the most successful campaign in brand history,” according to a press release.
“While the brand has historically rallied around warmer weather occasions, Twisted Tea is no longer approaching support seasonally,” the company said in the release. “In the past five years, Twisted Tea has seen significant growth in Q1 alone, highlighting the opportunity to speak to winter occasions across TV, digital, retail programming and more.”
The advertisement will run across TV and streaming platforms, including ABC, HBO Max and Hulu. Spots will also be broadcast during the NHL All Star game and during the Winter Olympics through local NBC coverage in New York, Chicago, Boston and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale.
Twisted Tea has posted double-digit growth year-over-year for more than a decade, according to the release. Off-premise dollar sales of Twisted Tea increased +31.9% in IRI-tracked channels (total U.S. multi-outlet plus convenience) for the 52-week period ending December 26, 2021 – surpassing Diageo’s Smirnoff brand family as the No. 1 FMB (excluding hard seltzer).
“Twisted Tea has really benefited significantly from people consuming more at home,” Dave Burwick, Boston Beer CEO, said during the company’s Q3 earnings call in October. “And we’ve seen it in pretty much every way you look at the brand, not just the measured channel growth rates, but the velocity, the household penetration, the repeat rates.”
Although Twisted Tea is now the top-selling FMB brand, the brand “failed twice” in its two-decade life, Boston Beer founder and chairman Jim Koch said during Beer Business Daily’s annual Beer Industry Summit last week.
“It failed as Bodean’s and failed as Twisted Tea, but we had some belief in it,” he said. “We thought it was gonna be yuppies who drink Snapple, and it turned out to be blue collar guys.”