Great Northern answered luxury indulgence ads with the free outdoors version

Extend Great Northern's 'The Beer For Up Here' platform with launch films and media that make the outdoors the ultimate feel-good upgrade.

Mirror ads: each film juxtaposes a high-end indulgence — the hotel, the tasting menu, the inner-city bar — with the great outdoors doing the same job for free.

Three launch films by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne with The Pool Collective, plus contextual OOH and digital bought against Urban List, Traveller and Good Food articles so the work ran next to the luxury content it answered.

The campaign extended Australia's number-one beer's brand platform across film, OOH and contextual digital; the material reports no sales figures.

In July 2022, Great Northern Brewing Co — Australia's number-one beer — launched a campaign built on a simple contrast: everything people pay dearly for to relax has a free equivalent in the great outdoors. Created by Clemenger BBDO Melbourne on the brand's existing 'The Beer For Up Here' platform, three launch films played off luxury hotels, fine dining and inner-city bars, mirroring each high-end indulgence with its outdoors counterpart.

National chief creative officer Jim Curtis framed the insight: making yourself feel good had gotten complicated — opulent retreats, restaurants that are hard to pronounce, complicated workouts — when much of what people need is already in the Australian outdoors. He also wanted the work's feel to give viewers 'a nice break from all the shouting in any given ad break'.

The media plan extended the joke: OOH and digital displays were bought against publications such as Urban List, Traveller and Good Food, so the outdoors answer appeared contextually beside the very luxury and travel content it was quietly undercutting. Production came from The Pool Collective with photographer Krystle Wright.

The juxtaposition structure gives the brand platform (outdoors = up here) a concrete enemy: paid relaxation.

Buying media inside luxury-adjacent editorial makes the targeting itself part of the idea — the ad answers the article it sits next to.

It's a documented platform-extension for Australia's biggest beer, showing how a brand idea compounds across years and executions.

The calm tone is itself a strategy in a category of shouting, and the material quotes the CCO saying exactly that.

Contextual media can be the idea's second act: placing the anti-luxury answer inside luxury content means the reader completes the joke themselves.

The July 2022 campaign ran across film, OOH and contextual digital for the Cairns-born brand; Great Northern and Clemenger continued the outdoors platform with later work such as 2024's 'Long Way for a Beer'.