← The Big Impression
The Big Impression
Firestone Walker Brewing’s Dustin Hinz on tapping beer and sports fans through CTV
00:20:54
Firestone Walker Brewing Company’s CMO says connected TV has made it easier to reach its sports-loving customers.
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- [00:00]
Damien Fowler
Damien.
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Alix
I'm Damien Fowler.
- [00:02]
Ilise Lafring
And I'm Ilise lafring.
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Alix
This week we're really excited to talk with Dustin Hynes, the chief marketing officer of Firestone Walker Brewing, a craft brewery based in California.
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Ilise Lafring
Dustin has been the chief marketer at Firestone for almost six years. He's an award winning marketer who knows how to build a culturally relevant brand.
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Alix
Also, he's a musician, and he helped build Guitar center into the powerhouse brand it is today. He worked there for 17 years, and you can ask any guitarist about Guitar center and it's important. And then he was Ernie Ball, music Man, which is famous for its guitar strings, which I love. I'm curious though, Eiles, do you play the guitar?
- [00:40]
Ilise Lafring
I wish, but. Okay, Damien, we're here to talk beer and how to market it in a crowded marketplace. So let's begin. So, Dustin, can you tell us a little bit about Firestone and the brand 805? It seems it really has a West coast vibe. Just like me. I'm from the west coast, so I can see that. I feel it.
- [01:04]
Damien Fowler
Firestone Walker is the culmination of David Walker and Adam Firestone's love for beer. They're brothers in law and they met, you know, they met back in the 90s when David fell in love with Adam's sister. And, you know, there's great stories about that. And then they found they had this mutual love for beer and they and the central coast of California, David being an expat from in British and, you know, Adam being, you know, Californian, they, you know, they founded this amazing brewery on the central coast and, you know, really focused on just a few craft beers. DBA was their first beer, and then Union Jack and there was a lot of craft was sort of an early movement. And then back in 2012, they stumbled upon this idea of 805. And 805 is the area code for the big swath of the central coast, a big piece of California all the way down to Ventura county, where actually I grew up. We like to say that, you know, the goal with 805 is to be the most globally recognized, regionally available beer in the world.
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Ilise Lafring
Very cool. But there are a lot of beers out there, even craft beers. What would you say is the point of differentiation? Is it the taste? Is it the west coast vibes? What would you say?
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Damien Fowler
I think the biggest point of differentiation for in beer is the brand position. You know, obviously, great brand position and great marketing is not going to solve a lousy product. So you got to have amazing Product and where we try to focus on being odds of the evens and really investing in our own legend and trying to stand for something and be the alternative choice. And thankfully beer is so big and there's so much opportunity that you can carve out a pretty nice size of the pie for yourself if you want to focus on being the alternative premium choice.
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Alix
One of the things that you just said about the importance of marketing and how marketing can drive the business seems key to this. Is there anything that you could pointers to that would. That you'd say, you know, this was the moment where, you know, we created brand awareness above and beyond or something like that.
- [03:05]
Damien Fowler
You know, the first one with, you know, the traditional 805, the black can, you know, I was very lucky to, you know, inherit five and a half years ago, you know, a slogan called Properly chill and Properly Chill sort of was the slogan for this. This idea that life on the Central coast was a little different. What we did last year and then going into this year, I believe that this is going to come out right around this new campaign is going to drop. Is this idea telling the story of our brand through the lens of our customer? We have this amazing roster of ambassadors. We call them authenticos and 805 authenticos and professional surfers, motocross riders, boxers, MMA fighters, artists, tattoo artists, you know, you name it. Span suspection. There's over 50 of them and they kind of COVID every single different customer group that we believe the brand represents. And we tell the story of that brand through those consumers or through those athletes. And then a couple other examples were what we did with Summer of Cerveza when we launched the extension of 805, the first extension after 10 years, which was, you know, a Mexican logger themed version of 805 with a little bit of lime in it. And the idea at the time was when you were looking at the marketplace, Mexican loggers were, were really on the rise. Corona obviously has an incredible background. Modelo is now at this point become the number one brand in the US Surpassing Bud Light. And consumers were definitely reaching for this, this idea of sort of an escapism beer. So when we launched the campaign with Summer Cerveza, we realized that we had to do something to stand out and create some differentiation between 8.05 blonde and 8.05 cerveza. And so the 8.05 cerveza campaign was the first time we ever showed the product in color. 8.05 has been black and white since its inception. In 2012 and with 805, Cerveza was the first time we ever put the product in color in the advertising. And it was a game changer. I mean, sales went from moderately successful to, you know, up 20% pretty consistently because we were able to create that differentiation in the idea that Cerveza was a light and refreshing product.
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Alix
I love that just by adding color. But it is interesting that you started out in black and white as a kind of campaign. What, why did. Why black and white?
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Damien Fowler
I think they realized they had. They needed to do something different to stand out back then. And trust me, it is a conversation pretty regularly when we're working on new ideas of now. There is a lot of consternation around the idea of how do we maintain the brand identity and not stray from it. Because we want to be timeless, not timely. So we're very, very focused on, hey, every decision we make is going to have an impact a decade from now, two decades from now. Because the greatest brands in beer are multi generational.
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Ilise Lafring
Totally. And I know we talked about this earlier because it can be really difficult to market alcohol products, especially on platforms like social media where there are age roadblocks. What are the channels that you decided to like, lean into for these campaigns and are there any that you're experimenting with now?
- [06:24]
Damien Fowler
I'd say at home's a good third of our total media investment. And then a big shift to TV about two years ago. And with connected TV platforms continuing to become more robust, it's made it a hell of a lot easier for us to get more geo targeted, you know, because I think that Spray and Pray doesn't work when you're a regional brand and you want to get really focused on zip codes and you want to try to drive measurement. And so connected TV has been huge for us. And whether that's through our partnerships with like the World Surf League or we're just doing a sports, you know, our brand. You know, what we know though is that from all of our consumer data is that a huge percentage of our customers are sports fans. They watch a lot of football, they watch a lot of baseball. Baseball. So what we do is we take our brand to those channels and through partnerships like espn, we've been able to really connect with consumers and drive some really nice measurable lift for the brand. You're watching a sports game and you're going to see beer brand X or insurance brand X with an athlete for that sport. And then you see our spot, which might have a bull rider in it or a surfer or a motocross rider. And it just stands out with your.
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Ilise Lafring
Brand'S embrace of sports and kind of that measurement piece of ctv. You must love that more live sports are coming into the connected TV space.
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Damien Fowler
I think the beneficiaries of this sort of democratization of content and it's making things more competitive. So as you see the Disney network, Hulu, ESPN, or you go to YouTube TV and some of the other platforms that are continuing to open up, it makes it really easy to be competitive in the space or to at have a voice. I think our team's been really good at, you know, identifying those opportunities, proving the efficacy of those investments so that we can continue to do them.
- [08:15]
Alix
You hinted at something about the seasonality of marketing, and I'm kind of interested in that, you know, as a marketer of beer. And I guess in lots of ways, as you said, you're kind of marketing lifestyle because you have, you know, associations with surfers and athletes and the summer. I'm kind of curious, you know, how often you think about the need to refresh campaigns and how do you keep them, like, relevant to the culture, cultural moment?
- [08:42]
Damien Fowler
Yeah, great question. You definitely have to in beer, especially with the retail partners. Right. You need to be seasonal. You know, I spent the first 20 years of my career on the music retail side as a retailer, so I know what retailers want. Right. They're going to want, hey, it's Memorial Day. I'm going to have a display in my store for a week and a half, two weeks. It better fit the theme of Memorial Day. Now, how you do that, you can do that without just stars and stripes. There's other ways to do that, but the idea of escapism and patriotism, to a degree. But when you look at the retail calendar, there are a myriad. There's 16 major 10 poles that you have to win. So our team is definitely working to make sure that we're taking the overall thematic of our brand and pulling that down into those temples. And that fits the larger brand story because obviously you don't have 16 different TV spots throughout the year. So we'll have several different campaigns throughout the year, but then those drop down into, like, Cinco de Mayo or Day of the Dead or Fourth of July. So you have to, depending on the channel that we're in. Yeah. Some stuff has to be far more granular to make sure that it's serving the need of that retailer or the desire of that retailer. And as well as making sure that we're still maintaining the brand identity that we want to have like, while everybody else does super bowl and does football, we're doing the World Surf League pipeline, which is like the super bowl of surf. So it's the official beer, the wsl. When everyone's doing super bowl, we're doing surfing.
- [10:11]
Alix
Now, Dustin, our listeners can't see this, but I know behind you you've got some fantastic vintage guitars there, which, you know, I wanted to talk. I know that you're a musician and before you worked at 805, you worked as a marketer in the music industry, including for Ernie Ball, Music man and Guitar Center. And I'm kind of interested in the kind of synergies that you might have found there between marketing to musicians and the kind of now the position you're in now marketing beer.
- [10:42]
Damien Fowler
It's really sort of a story of, you know, serendipity. I got my first guitar when I was 14 years old and it sort of changed my life. Like music just sported became this like obsession and it's what I wanted to do. Started a band and did, you know, typical story, like, didn't go to college, like, was like, oh, college, like, I'm gonna be in a band, mom. Like, what are you talking about? And so I begged her at the time she was working, she was the executive assistant to the CEO of Guitar center back in the 90s, like when they were still, you know, they were still a small company. And I said, hey, just give me a job in the mail room or something. And so like, just give me the summer. Let me prove to you that my band can be great before I have to go to college. And. And so she got me a job in the mail and like said three months, that's it. And three months turned into 18 years. And you know, and I worked my, you know, I worked my way up to, you know, vice president and you know, that typical age old story. But like, what I found really early on when I got there was, and I remember there was a moment I was there a couple of months working in the mailroom, excited. You know, in the mailroom is right next to the marketing department. And there was a great VP of marketing was Mike Visveri. I still talk to him to this day, 20 something years later. He always says, you know, his joke is, you're the best hire ever made. But I remember like looking at the marketing materials and saying to the guys, like, hey, we're not marketing to, like, I'm the customer. Why don't you talk to me? Like, we should change the way that we Talk to the customers. Because this doesn't make sense. Like, I'm the customer. I don't want to read this. Like, so I pitched him some ideas and he's like, yeah, that's a great idea. You want a job in marketing. And, you know, and I went from like $4.50 an hour to like $9 an hour. I thought I was rich. I'm 18 years old and, you know, I started that journey. And I think what I realized really early on and what was great about Guitar center was that our mission was to mint new customers. We realized early on, through a great visionary CEO we had, Marty Albertson, was that, you know, we had to make sure that we were creating musicians. There wasn't a lot of them. There's a really, you know, when you think about the population of the world, I think it's like 2% are musicians. So if you want to continue to sell guitars and you want to continue to sell instruments, you've got to inspire people to want to play music. So our mission became, you know, taking this great feeling and propelling that and perpetuating it to get more people excited about it. We became a platform for artists and creating, you know, over the course of my 20 years, I got to create TV shows and write documentaries and make slashes documentary. I got the things that you would only dream of when you were a kid to make art with other artists that inspired the world. And I think the common thread through all of that was that, you know, great marketing, great brands stand for something clear and enduring. I'm very, very lucky that as a songwriter and a musician early on that I found this extension of that creative process to sort of keep me inspired. I mean, marketing in a lot of ways. Your writers, your songwriters, your creatives, and you get to do that while also tackling for me at least, the necessary evil of the lift analysis, analytics, and some of those things that come with the business.
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Alix
Well, musicians have to be marketers these days anyway, right?
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Ilise Lafring
That's very true. And that 2%, we at least have two in our midst because Damian's a music as well, so. But yeah, that. It's so interesting that you talk about that area of the population. And in some ways it's almost harder to reach those, like, very niche communities.
- [14:09]
Damien Fowler
Yeah, there's that great quote. I don't know if it came from Nike, it's probably Nike, but what's that? Speak to the core loud enough that everyone else can hear. I mean, I think that's. That's always. That's been A mission of music. I mean, you remember the indie movement or the punk movement, it was like everybody didn't want to be mainstream and it was just like, do this thing, own your audience. And then what happened happens is the cool thing, everybody wants to sit at the cool table, everybody wants to be a part of the movement. But you can't market to the people that want to be in the movement. You have to market to the people who have started the movement. And then what happens is then you can maintain some credibility.
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Alix
I'm just curious, you know, to get you a high level perspective on what do you think needs to change in the, the ad marketplace today, which, you know, as we all know, is very much digital and programmatic.
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Damien Fowler
I think product placement right now, especially like on podcasts, is just incredibly oversaturated. And I understand that when you've got a major budget and you're moving money around and you're trying to do everything you can to drive eyeballs, but I have this conversation all the time at the agency. I'm not interested in the most amount of eyeballs. I want the right ones. And when I look at a podcast and I just see energy drinks on tables and then right behind it I see a Starbucks cup and the cans aren't open, I just think there's too much of that going on. To me, there's not real connections. So I think one of the things for me that's just unfortunate is because of the amount of money and the amount of ad money that's available and it's all moving from different platforms is that sort of approach has created, I think, a really high level of high bar for entry into some of these categories. The expectations of money that are tied to some of these opportunities are so overblown. So I think that to me, that's always been something that I've always struggled with, that I always hope is going to work itself out. And well, I think that you go through ebbs and flows, especially when times get tough, people will cut back on their marketing. They come back on sponsorships, and that's when opportunities open up. And if you're smart and you manage your money effectively and you have, and you have dollars when, when other brands are carving back, that's when you can start to find really interesting opportunities. But for me, yeah, influencer marketing, product seeding, you know, I've never been excited about it. You know, one of the things that we say all the time at Firestone Walker is keep the main thing the main thing. And by doing that, we prevent Ourselves from chasing too many squirrels in the backyard.
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Ilise Lafring
I love that.
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Alix
Yeah.
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Ilise Lafring
Is there anything you are obsessed with figuring out right now?
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Damien Fowler
I mean, we sell millions of cases of beer and our first party data, we've done an amazing job of our first party data emails, building customer attention. But there is this weird thing with social like, and I'm just obsessed with trying to figure out what it is. And our agency's got great relationships with meta and these platforms and nobody can seem to give me the answer of like, what is happening on the back end within the algorithms that is preventing some of the biggest brands in the world with tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of consumers, this ability to create real audiences on these platforms. Because we live in a world now where the whole, you know, all content is consumed through, you know, just a few channels. When you think about YouTube, you know, whatever happens with TikTok, Instagram, you know, meta, et cetera, like, there's only a handful of channels where a majority of all of the content consumption is taking place. And if, and if every single one of those has a toll booth between you and your customer, but then there's also a filter that is preventing you from, you know, develop, you know, really building your audience. Like, I'm obsessed with trying to figure that out. If we do believe in this idea of the zeitgeist and that culture matters and that brands stand for something clear and enduring, the world is going to continue down this digital path. And sure, point of sale and billboards and TV advertising are great ways to tell people about your brand, but is the way to get your arms around them. It's going to be on these platforms and the ones that are coming. And I think that's what the industry as a whole is always. The industry as a whole struggles with this. And I think it can be dangerous in the sense that you over obsess it and then you put too much money into like, well, I gotta grow followers or I gotta grow my audience versus like, well, I just gotta drive. I gotta drive affinity in purchase intent. And so that's, I think, the balance of, like, how do we, you know, how do we focus on stuffing the funnel, creating a tremendous amount of energy for our brands. The right partnerships being is omnipresent in the right cultural segments that we wanna be in, but at the same time try to figure out, you know, how we can expand our tent and get more people into it.
- [18:46]
Alix
Wow, Alix, I love that conversation with Dustin. I mean, it's not every day you get to talk to somebody who's a musician and a marketer and who's able to tie both of those things together so well as he did. But what was your kind of. What was the standout thing to you that he said?
- [19:02]
Ilise Lafring
You know, I think what really stuck out was kind of playing how, like Firestone and Dustin, like, kind of play that fine line of, you know, keeping consistent, but also, you know, not being too rigid and like, trying new things with customers. I know with like 9,000 plus breweries, it's kind of crazy that there's so much competition. Yeah. And beer brands have to stick out. But what he said was really interesting about staying consistent with like an agency and measurement and really trying to find, you know, making sure that what you're making, art essentially actually makes sense.
- [19:45]
Alix
I agree with you. And I feel like one of the most powerful things he said to me was when he was at Guitar center, when he was there for 17 years, his vision was to mint new musicians and, you know, identifying that only 2% of the world population. 2%, I think he said musicians. So you have to inspire more people to want to create music. And taking that sort of core philosophy and applying it to his current role at 805 seems to be something that's driving him as a mission driven marketer. I think, you know, as he said, great brands have to stand for something enduring. So in that regard, I think he's really smart. And to do this at this cultural moment where there's so much fragmentation, that is one way to help him clear through all the clutter and stay focused.
- [20:31]
Ilise Lafring
Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes too was like, you know, keep the main thing the main thing. And that keeps us basically from chasing the squirrels.
- [20:44]
Alix
That's it for this edition of the current podcast.
- [20:47]
Ilise Lafring
I'm Aelys.
- [20:48]
Alix
And I'm Damien and we'll see you next time.