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BrewDog put one word in a tweet and it cost the founder £470,000 of his own money.
On 12 November 2020 BrewDog told its followers that ten solid gold Punk IPA cans were hidden in twelve-packs shipping from its online shop. The prize was a gold can worth £15,000, plus BrewDog shares and a VIP tour of the brewery. A second run of the same idea followed, with wrapped cans hidden in Hazy Jane cases and the promise that finders could claim a solid gold, 24 carat one.
People bought beer. People found cans.
What turned up was a replica can finished in 24 carat plating, made to order by a luxury goods firm. Plated, not solid, and worth a good deal less than fifteen thousand pounds.
Twenty five people complained to the Advertising Standards Authority. On 20 October 2021 the ASA upheld the complaints. The advertising was misleading and the promotion had not been run fairly.
James Watt later wrote that it was his mistake and nobody else’s, called them three very expensive mistaken tweets, and paid the winners around £470,000 out of his own pocket so the business did not have to carry it.
Here is the part worth taking away.
Nobody in that building thought “solid” was a claim. It was an adjective doing a bit of work in a tweet, written fast, in the voice the brand had built its whole identity on. Punchy, slightly over the top, the way everything else they wrote sounded.
To the person peeling the wrapper off a can in their kitchen, it was a specification.
That is the gap, and it opens up in a very specific place. A promotion is not marketing copy. It is a contract. And unlike the rest of your marketing, it gets read extremely closely by exactly one kind of person, the winner, at the exact moment they care more about the precise wording than anyone has ever cared about anything you have written.
Every other piece of copy you produce is skimmed by people with no stake in it. This one is parsed, line by line, by someone who is about to be either delighted or furious depending on what it literally says.
Most of us have one of these running right now and have never thought about it in those terms. Up to 70% off. Free delivery. Lifetime access. Unlimited. Next day. Guaranteed. Every one of those has a literal meaning that somebody will eventually hold you to, and it will usually be the customer you would least enjoy arguing with, on a channel where the argument is public.
The fix costs nothing and takes ten minutes. Before a promotion goes out, read it back as the winner rather than as the writer. Not as the person who knows what was meant, but as the person who only has the words.
The second BrewDog run is the bit that still gets me. They put the promotion out again after the first one, which means “solid gold” made it through a copy check twice.