Buddy Media and Twitter have partnered on an "age-screening" solution for brands who want to check on followers where age-sensitive products are concerned, like alcohol.

The free service for marketers has been in beta-testing for a months with a select group of alcohol brands including Brown Forman’s Jack Daniels, Jim Beam’s Skinny Girl feed, and MillerCoors' Coors Light and Miller Lite.

“Until now, companies have had to develop their own custom, one-off “age-screening” solutions. The result has been a patchwork of solutions with different approaches, processes and levels of success,” wrote Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow.Continue reading...

Anheuser-Busch is hoping it can be more persuasive encouraging responsible drinking via Facebook than Pernod Ricard has been. Pernod's 2012 responsible-drinking campaign included a Facebook pledge on responsible drinking — a move that garnered only 115 "likes" after a week.

Now the American beer giant's new responsible-drinking offensive is testing Facebook to see if it can rally support for a social-responsibility message that it has been repeating for 30 years now. "With close to half a billion adults on Facebook, we see an enormous opportunity to expand our reach to newer generations of adult drinkers," stated Kathy Casso, VP of corporate social responsibility for Anheuser-Busch.

A new website, the optimistically-named NationofResponsibleDrinkers.com, asks adults to pledge their commitment to drink responsibly and share it through Facebook.

Pledgers are swearing allegiance to respect the legal drinking age, enjoy alcohol responsibly and "know when to say when" — or volunteer or find a designated driver if they've had too much. Indications of pledges are then plotted geographically on an interactive map as the "movement" spreads.Continue reading...

It's water. It's booze "Alcohol-Inspired Refresher" with a dash of berry or a citrus twist. But you can call it Air. 

That's the brand name for the cutting edge of the alcoholic beverage market: carbonated water infused with alcohol and refreshing bubbles, named after the stuff that dares to defy the Helvetica fatigue.

It's a "refreshingly" simple branding in a market where "blackout drinks" carbonated alcoholic beverages once ruled.

But selling Air in a can — seriously?Continue reading...

Facebook users can now capture their nightlife experience in a rich multimedia manner that shares the fun, virtually.

It's all thanks to the NightTag app, which "lets your friends know where you are, what you're doing, and what you're listening to. It gives you club listings [in select regions] and, if you're not going out, brings the music to you through a selection of live radio streams."

The app, billed as the first social music app specifically for Facebook, posts a photo from, say, a nightclub; activates music-recognition software that identifies the song and the location where it’s playing via GPS, then posts the elements onto a user’s Facebook Timeline in one, unified photo post.Continue reading...

The attorneys at the massive AB InBev have been trying to get little Czech brewer Budějovický Budvar to stop using the Budweiser name, but nothing has worked yet and the King of Beers may be seeing its Czech rival in high court as the longrunning dispute continues.

The UK Court of Appeal ruled in favor of Budvar on July 3rd, when the trademark lawyers at Marks & Clark scored the victory for the smaller brewer, according to TheLawyer.com. As it stands now, both brewers are still allowed to use the name Budweiser. And that means, of course, that this legal fight likely isn’t over. 

The two companies are now gearing up for an even bigger courtroom battle. If the Court of Appeals had ruled for AB InBev, it would have seriously hurt the smaller Czech brewer, TheLawyer reports.

“This decision confirms what, in our opinion, is obvious following the favorable ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union in September last year,” said one lawyer for Budvar. “That as a result of the decades-long honest use of the mark Budweiser by both Budvar and Anheuser-Busch in the UK, both parties should be entitled to a trademark registration.”

Continuing its annual tradition, Jack Daniel's commissioned graphic designers to come up with their interpretation of America's July 4th holiday. The results (along with short films on their process and inspiratioin) can be viewed at jackdaniels.com/independence.

The brand worked with independent artists in Berkeley, CA; Austin, TX; and Brooklyn, NY, to create five posters centered around the theme of Independence. The poster above, for example, was "sewn entirely by hand using hand-dyed, American muslin fabric soaked in tea and Jack Daniel's."

The project also raises a glass this year to letterpress pioneers Yee-Haw Industries, which produced 10 posters for the project kick-off last year and (sadly) recently shut its doors.

Discard those images of snobby wine sophisticates who, like the wines they drink, are ripened with age. These days, wine makers are seeking out a new youthful market: Millennials and Gen Xers who want to break with tradition and drink wine much as they might craft beer.

That explains the three new wine brands coming to the U.S. from Diageo: Stark Raving, Butterfly Kiss, and Rose'N'Blum. Each of the three brands has its own quirky positioning with the young drinker clearly in mind.

"We realize the younger wine drinkers are far less influenced by wine traditions and 'rules,' " says Greg Kryder, president of Diageo Chateau & Estate Wines.

"We have a large population of wine buyers that turned 21 after the Millennium, they grew up with wine as part of their families' lifestyle, and they are fearless in their selections. ... We aim to create wines that fire that enthusiasm and satisfy that curiosity."

Stark Raving is perhaps the edgiest of the three new brands, inspired by the idea of "going rogue," according to Diageo. The company says the line is based on the "belief that experimentation, unusual blends and sourcing, and a little touch of madness can lead to crazy good wines."Continue reading...

Anheuser-Busch InBev already owned half of Mexican Grupo Modelo but the world’s biggest brewer apparently needs to keep consuming all in its sight. InBev shelled out $20.1 billion to grab the other half of the brewer of such beers as Corona and Modelo and stake its claim to the growing Mexican market. The name of the website it set up to announce the deal says it all: GlobalBeerLeader.com.

It's a huge purchase, to be sure, but AB InBev sees the upside in the company as a whole and its Corona brand specifically. Modelo “is Mexico's biggest brewer with a 50 percent-plus market share in a virtual duopoly with Heineken's FEMSA Cerveza in the world's fourth most-profitable beer market,” Reuters reports. “Corona is the biggest imported beer in the lucrative U.S. market.” InBev shelled out so much dough partly because Modelo stakeholders had no real incentive to sell.Continue reading...