Save Pub Life

CONCEPTION | DESIGN | ARTWORK

Challenge

It’s March 2020: the pandemic has now hit the UK and all venues are closed. Brits hoped they’d only be away from the pub for a couple of weeks but lockdown was only just beginning. The outlook quickly became bleak and with pubs in a perilous financial position, they needed all the help they could get. In partnership with Vizeum, DraftLine looked at virus patterns in other countries, planning ahead to deliver a rescue campaign for the nation’s beloved pubs.

Idea

We created a gift card programme that helped pubs and bars when they needed it most. The Save Pub Life campaign allowed people to support their local by purchasing a gift card to be redeemed upon reopening but, crucially, provided the pub with much-needed cash immediately.

To incentivise purchase, we doubled whatever punters put in to help struggling pubs even further. We created the first ever redemption platform with a fast turnaround payback to the POCs. We navigated all the legal & regulatory pitfalls that had stopped any previous attempts to build this, because ABI is always at its best in a crisis.

Results

This gave punters something to look forward to during tough times, but even more importantly gave pubs a financial lifeline when they were most in need.

The entire back-end of how breweries deal with pubs had to be radically changed in record time, but in the end the initiative raised tens of millions, going far beyond the UK and into 26 countries.