Rye River Brewing Company
Back to the Source for Rye River Brewing Company
Highlights
➜ Combined media reach 2.4m
➜ Successful brand transition to brewery-led brand including creative development of tagline
➜ Development and execution of successful integrated campaign to engage core audiences
The Brief
Founded in 2013, Rye River Brewing Company in Kildare has quickly grown to become one of the biggest and best craft breweries in Ireland. &Smyth was engaged to help the brewery streamline its brand and transition its best-selling McGargles range of craft beers to the brewery-led Rye River Brewing Company brand. The Celbridge brewery had identified that while McGargles was the #1 selling craft beer in Ireland in 2021, the brand alienated a wider consumer demographic which it was seeking to engage. While the liquids themselves would remain unchanged, the brand and identity was a step into a more polished, premium positioning to reflect its status as the world’s most decorated brewery in 2020 and 2021 (World Beer Awards).
The Approach
The &Smyth team worked closely with RRBC, visiting the brewery to get a full tour and sense of its scale, operations and background story. From this, we crafted a digital-first integrated campaign to best amplify the brand and raise awareness of the brand transition. As rebrands in themselves are not newsworthy, we identified other newshooks that would appeal to media, and leveraged these to tell the brand story. We took the angle of the brewery being a source of creativity, great-tasting beer and innovation and themed our campaign as going ‘Back to The Source’, playing on the origin of the brand on the banks of the Rye River. We co-ordinated and managed a media partnership with the Irish Times, a product drop to targeted media and drinks influencers and amplified RRBC’s profile at events which it was attending.
The Impact
We secured high-profile, quality media placements across national media, local media and drinks media targets which resulted in a combined media reach of 2.4m. Our creative conceptualisation was carried through the brewery’s designwork used on OOH advertising and in-store branding, and we were able to leverage the brewery’s attendance at a number of high-profile events such as Bord Bia Bloom to help tell their story to a wide consumer demographic.