The boss of Brewdog has said he paid out almost £500,000 to winners of the company’s misleading “solid gold” beer can promotion
James Watt said said he made “some costly mistakes” in a promotion which offered people the chance to find a solid gold can hidden in cases in 2021.
He said he mistakenly believed the cans were made of solid gold and told the same to customers in initial promotional tweets that the cans were “solid gold cans”.
“The initial tweets I sent out told customers of the prospect of finding ‘solid gold cans’,” Watt wrote on LinkedIn, claiming each one was still worth £15,000. “It was a silly mistake. Things started to go wrong when the winners got their cans.”
A number of the winners contacted the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates advertising and marketing in the UK, complaining that the “solid gold” claim was misleading.
The ASA subsequently upheld the complaints about the marketing with the false claim appearing in three of 50 promotional tweets, according to Watt.
“Those three tweets were enough to do a lot of damage,” said Watt. “It blew up into a media storm. The gold can saga was headline news. The campaign launch morphed into a frenzy, with attacks coming in from all quarters. It got pretty grim. I should have been more careful.”
Watt said that because it was his error, he had contacted all 50 gold can winners to offer them the “full cash amount” as an alternative to the prize if they were unhappy”.
“All in all, it ended up costing me around £470,000 – well over 2 and a half years’ salary,” he stated, adding that he now owns 40 of the gold cans.
Watt’s confession came a month after the Scotland-based brewer lost its status as a B Corp in less than two years after joining the scheme. B Corp offers certification of a company’s ethical commitment to the environment, community and staff.
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