The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery – Winner 2012 PRINZ Supreme Award

More than a third of New Zealand males have tried home-brewing but most have not carried through with it due to the time involved and the low-quality beer produced.

Kiwi brewmaster and inventor, Ian Williams has solved this problem, as well as the 12 problems associated with homebrewing, producing the world’s first personal brewery. Porter Novelli was the PR company commissioned to tell the WilliamsWarn story.

The WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery was unveiled to a crowd of beer-lovers, trade and mainstream media in the Art Lounge at the Auckland Museum on 8 April 2011. The launch of WilliamsWarn received significant traditional media coverage via Campbell Live, Breakfast, Sunday Star-Times, New Zealand Herald, Stuff, 3News.co.nz, Get Frank, Idealog, The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, Wired, as well as many other beer, lifestyle and technology publications.

During planning stages of the launch, Porter Novelli identified the WilliamsWarn instructional video as a potential piece of viral content and a link to the video was submitted to leading social news websites.

The PR and social media drive launched WilliamsWarn onto the global stage. Googling WilliamsWarn prior to launch resulted in zero hits. After launch, Google results showed more than 100,000 hits. After three and a half months the instructional video had been viewed more than 170,000 times. The WilliamsWarn website had received more than 370,000 hits. The launch activity generated more than 20 million impressions (conservative estimate based on Tweetreach and Social Mention data) across social media channels.

This activity has directly affected Ian William's business and following the launch he received more than 200 offers of distribution in 50 countries, including offers from three US department stores. WilliamsWarn sold out of his first batch of 60 units at $5,600 each. WillliamsWarn has since been able to attract further investment from a large Asia Pacific brewery, and is currently in the process of signing a deal for US distribution rights to a large US company.

Porter Novelli team: Alex Speedy, Bill Rundle

Porter Novelli won the Supreme Award and the Special Project/Event category at the 2012 PRINZ Awards for the activity outlined above.

WilliamsWarn’s brand strategy and design agency, Studio Alexander also won Gold in the Best in Design category at the International Graphis Awards 2012.