Putting Jeremy Clarkson's Lager On The Map

Think Jeremy Clarkson then think; Top Gear, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, farming, Amazon, notoriety, and now... lager?

Hawkstone launched in 2021 in collaboration with Clarkson and the Cotswold Brewing Company (which has since rebranded to Hawkstone Brewery), and uses barley from Clarkson's famed Diddly Squat Farm to create what aspires to be the next best alcoholic beverage.

Tasked with putting Hawkstone on the map is creative agency T&P; getting audiences to love a product is one thing, but getting the golden by-product of 'Clarksonian' farming folklore and turning it into something more than a celebrity curiosity gathering dust in the drinks aisle is another. 

It’s ‘Hard to make, easy to drink’ brand platform is testament to the message the brand wants to relay: Hawkstone only exists down to the grit of farmers — it's not a side hustle from a celebrity. 

“We've done everything as a marketing department from the naming, the design world, the brand strategy, and all the media and creative output,” begins Tom Sutton, head of &Accelerate. “We were really careful, particularly with a celebrity founder. Championing farmers is our way into the hardships and the graft that goes into the product that we create, and then taste is that reward at the end when the product is ready for drinking.”

Hawkstone is currently available in nearly 3,500 pubs across the UK, and is aspiring for the number to continue growing.

Using British Humour As A Pillar

A brand with a celebrity founder requires delicate care to resonate with its offering, not just through who is associated with it. For T&P, utilising British humour as a means to gather audience attention as opposed to relying on the Clarkson name proved the strategy. 

“We use Britishness, craft, and humour as a major pillar,” says Sutton, and one of the main ways this has been achieved is through its association with a farmers' Choir. 

While sounding innocent on the surface, the underlying aim was to create work that would get banned due to its language fitting with Clarkson’s style. 

“A big strategic gear was centred around the idea of creating a farmers choir which can then be brought to life through loads of tactical executions,” he continues. “Firstly, we auditioned over 500 singing farmers and cast a choir of 40 of them. Then we created a bunch of ads that were quite funny but we knew they were never going to get on TV because of the bruising language.

“Instead of planning a big TV campaign, we actively invited all of the UK consumer press to a big event, made a song and dance about how it was unfair that we had our ad banned, and the press delivered the content for us.”

There proved method to the madness; the work delivered over 200 million impressions through press and social media according to T&P, which spurred the campaign to reach further through a vinyl release, Spotify uploads, and even entering the choir into Britain’s Got Talent. 

In the Gen AI age the industry is living in, T&P utilises the software to make the most of its choir success and vary its content. 

“We actually cloned the choir, a bit like our José Mourinho work for Snickers, and created 50 variants of different songs that we supplied to our partners,” explains Sutton. “With Young’s Pubs — they’ve each been given their own asset to then seed through their own social channels.

“The posts that we gave our pubs were 10 times better than their typical posts. The challenge comes as the Hawkstone business scales,” he outlines. “The number of pubs selling it is constantly increasing so we've got to start creating content for more and more outlets and doing that at scale.”

A Content Engine That Breaks Through The AI Slop

While using AI for its choir content, T&P also utilise the software to create unique, specialised content for pubs supplying Hawkstone.

“For the brand platform we run that across two speeds. We've got a strategic gear where we create this consistent brand product storytelling to create a brand platform for us to build from,” continues Sutton. “And then we have this tactical gear, which is where we bring that strategic gear to life with vast experimentation, iteration and ideas that are often spawning. We might have an idea in the morning that will be live and in the feed by the afternoon. And for that in particular, at the moment, we use a lot of Gen-AI to get our ideas out there so quickly.”

In doing so, the agency has created AI tool engines that allows for the customisation of local marketing to suit the needs of its user. 

Speaking at T&P’s ‘Hungry Algorithms, Tired Creative’ session, Chelsea Carson, T&P’s innovation lead, explains just how the work is churned out through a live example with a prototype campaign, where from just an image upload the software can create a full-fledged, information-rich creative from beer mats to social media videos. 

“I'm going to choose my pub name, upload an image of the front of my pub, and then I'm going to hit continue, where, from a pub owner's point of view, everything else is automated. 

“It uses a node-based system that allows us to connect APIs, agents, AI tools, a bunch of different applications, decision steps and logic so that we can build these automated workflows,” Carson continues. “The first flow, which is our context and strategy flow, has already happened in the background when I hit continue; it went away to the Google Places API and grabbed a whole bunch of information about that pub - the town it's in, what the main motorway or road is, local landmarks.

“The second agent is going to do a bit more digging. It takes that information and does a more interrogated web search, looking for things that might be interesting as our creative angle or hook for that particular pub, like being near a castle or heritage sight. 

“That is all going to go towards our strategy agent, so that agent knows all about our campaign and our audience and our brand and what we're trying to do here. It's going to be thinking, ‘How can I take parts of that information and find a unique way in for the creative route for this particular pub?’”

This information then gets sent to the software’s writing agents, where creative writing agents who have access to a “central knowledge base” conjure headlines, sublines and scripts that are resonant of Hawkstone’s brand tone of voice and fit its social media guidelines. 

“This then creates three different assets: a post, a video, and a beer mat,” Carson outlines. “That’s just for one pub but could have just as easily been 500. If we scale that out to even 5,000 pubs and ran it at the same time, all of those would take five minutes collectively.” 

As brand fascination about AI grows — and whether it can be trusted as a source of creativity — T&P’s work with Hawkstone is an example of how this emerging technology can help put a brand on the map at scale.