New Belgium Brewing is turning regular people into celebrities gracing the back cover of Rolling Stone magazine … sort of.
The brew company is set up in Fort Collins, CO, this summer, a local for a popular summer beer festival.
At its event, people can pose within a print ad that appears on the back cover of Rolling Stone, among other places. Cultivator Advertising & Design in Denver has turned the full-page ad into a full-size photo set.
The ad, for New Belgium’s flagship Fat Tire Ale, is in keeping with the company’s “green” efforts, playing on the use of bicycles as a means of transportation along with a pitch for the brewer’s 2010 Tour de Fat bike festival, which visits 10 western cities from Chicago to Austin to L.A. to Seattle.
The ad shows a man and a woman balanced on the pedals of the beer’s signature fat tire bike, in turn balanced on a slack-rope. It is also meant as a whimsical statement about Fat Tire Ale’s balanced brewing.
A tasting room lets people try the beer and sits adjacent to the ad. (People must be photographed before they start imbibing). They photograph themselves “balanced” on the bike and, can then uploading the shot to New Belgium’s Facebook page, enter to win one of 10 custom-designed Felt single-speed cruisers—just like the image in the New Belgium Brewing bottle cap and logo—that is being given away weekly from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
The print ad appears in Outside, Wired (plus Wired iPad), Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Sunset, Backpacker, Paste, Wend, and Draft, and also in local weeklies in 23 states. Media agency is Backbone Media, Carbondale, Co.
New Belgium Brewing Co. is employee-owned, wind powered, pro-bicycle, and recycles, reuses or composts 73% of its waste stream. Its craft beers are sold in all states west of the Mississippi except Louisiana, and Utah, and east of Mississippi in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
