How Lucky Saint smashed Dry Jan becoming the UK’s #1 alcohol-free beer brand 

Challenge

The UK’s first-ever official beer of Dry January, Lucky Saint, planned to run their biggest advertising campaign to date. With out-of-home ads erected nationwide, the campaign aimed to raise awareness among new audiences; a lot rode on getting it right.  

We weight our marketing spend quite heavily in January because we’re an alcohol-free brand. It’s quite a risk because you’re betting a lot of your spend on the first month of the year. So we wanted to make sure that we weren’t going into it completely blind.

Emily Laws, Head of Brand at Lucky Saint

Solution

Lucky Saint already worked with Attest for brand tracking so they reached out to discuss creative testing their out-of-home ads. Their Head of Brand, Emily Laws, hoped it would settle an internal debate: how prominent should the logo be, and which lines of copy would work best?

I was keen to use creative testing to gain perspective. Only getting the opinions of people who worked here, who know the brand inside out, wasn’t necessarily the best way to judge whether our creative was landing with our target audience.

Lucky Saint tested four different versions of their proposed ad. They asked respondents for their initial reaction to the ads, followed by the product and brand that they thought they belonged to. They also probed them as to what messages they felt were communicated, what their perceptions of Lucky Saint were, and their intent after seeing the ads. Based on the responses, Emily was able to weight the campaign heavily towards the best-performing ads.

We were quite comprehensive in understanding what people took away from the ads. I think when you’re putting a considerable amount of money behind a campaign, it’s good to go into it feeling confident this is going to work.