brian wood - Michelob Ultra

Running and beer might not seem like an obvious pairing, but for Michelob Ultra, the two are a perfect fit. To prove this, we saw an opportunity to be more than the official beer sponsor of the world’s largest foot race, the TCS New York City Marathon. We put our brand into action with a 360 campaign and reinforced that “running for beer” is more than a funny race course sign.

CREDITS: Brian Wood, CD/AD; Mike Beamer, CD/CW; Matt Turnier, ACD/CW; Jason LaFlore, ACD/AD; Rebecca Kotoske, ACD/AD; Jason Getty, Senior AD; Kevin Grady, ECD/Design Director; Sam Luchini, ECD/AD; Liz Taylor, CCO

Michelob ULTRA NYC Marathon Campaign Film

With the help of Coach Flanagan, we launched a national Team ULTRA recruitment campaign on social channels.

We announced the winners of our Team ULTRA contest on social with 94 bottles of beer on the wall, each featuring the name of the runner.

We partnered with Jimmy Kimmel to create a competition for hopefuls to race against Guillermo for a chance to win the coveted 95th bib on Team ULTRA during a live broadcast of Jimmy Kimmel Live in Brooklyn, NY.

Once the 95th bib was awarded, we sent training kits welcoming our beer runners to Team ULTRA and help officially kick off their marathon training. The kit included a signed note from Coach Flanagan, shoes from Newton, training swag and 25 oz. of liquid encouragement.

Each welcome kit included a Team ULTRA training shirt, which sweat revealed "I LIKE BEER" during workouts.

We leveraged Instagram and Facebook so Coach Flanagan could lead a virtual Team ULTRA run club to help our beer runners train for NYC.

We kicked off race weekend with a hard-to-miss welcome message directly across from the marathon expo at Javits Center.

We designed and outfitted Team ULTRA with bold race day singlets to help our 95 runners stand out in the crowd.

We created an unprecedented out-of-home domination that included over 100 unique boards along the 26.2-mile race course to help over 52,000 runners from around the world count down to beer, a.k.a. the finish line.

Our 95 Team ULTRA runners were all smiles at the finish line, and thirsty for beer.

Coach Flanagan celebrated with her fellow Team ULTRA marathon finishers at our post-race party. Her post says it all.