Gen Z is top of mind for most marketers, but Beck’s built its latest campaign around excluding them. The beer brand collaborated with agency AKQA to release Beck’s 70+, a limited-edition brew designed for seniors.
Beck’s claims to be the most bitter mainstream beer in Brazil, but as people age they lose some of their sensitivity to bitter tastes. To compensate for this, Beck’s 70+ ups its levels of International Bitterness Units, a scale that measures the bitterness of beer. The brew can only be purchased online or in stores by shoppers who show an ID demonstrating they are 70 or older.
“For the seniors, it’s basically the same taste of the Beck’s original for younger people,” AKQA global chief creative officer Diego Machado told Adweek. “What could be seen as a weakness becomes a superpower. At this age, they can take way more bitter, but Gen Z can’t really handle this. It’s too much.”
A minute-long video explains the way taste buds change with age, and then launches into a riff on the film Superbad’s McLovin fake ID scene. It shows a woman being IDed to confirm that she is 70+ before bringing a case of the beer to her friends outside. The film was shared across the brand’s digital and social channels, but took off on TikTok where younger consumers were tagging their parents and grandparents.
“They would ask them, ‘Can you find someone to buy this beer for me? I want to try it,’” Machado said.
People began taking the video to heart, offering to create fake IDs just to help others try the 70+ beer. The brand is launching a “grandpa dealers” service that will allow younger users to connect with seniors to buy the beer for them. The campaign’s success will be measured based on social interactions and sales of both the limited-edition beer and the standard Beck’s.
“We’re still responding and creating new features, and we will for the next month or two at least because it got so much response,” said AKQA creative director Rodrigo Barbosa. “We’re looking at making the campaign even bigger.”
Triggering FOMO
Beck’s also activated its existing sponsorship of last month’s Gop Tun Festival in São Paulo, setting up a VIP area only open to 70+ drinkers.
“It was really fun to see the line of Gen Z and then say, ‘No, you can’t be here,’” Machado said. “Gen Z is suffering from FOMO because there’s this new product and it’s really stylish, and they want to be a part of it.”
Beck’s tapped its usual pool of influencers and asked them to invite their parents and grandparents to the event. The campaign launched two days before the festival and other consumers followed their lead, posting on TikTok that it would be the first time attending the event with their family.
The 70+ beer is sold in silver gray cans instead of the brand’s usual black and green, and posters promoting the product at the festival used a “proudly grey” message. Other lines include, “Your grandparents never made you feel so old,” showing a group of seniors partying, and “Only for those who have been young for decades,” which depicts a group drinking beers in the same convenience store from the film.
The campaign is also meant to tap into the growing pro-aging moment, which acknowledges that as global life expectancies rise, seniors want to remain active and are less focused on looking younger than they are on living their best lives. The brand is asking more people in the 70s to become influencers.
