Introduction

With annual sales of 3.8 million hectoliters in 2015, Bitburger is among Germany’s best selling and arguably most popular breweries. The company was founded in 1817 by Johann Wallenborn and is headquartered in Bitburg, Germany.

From 2012 until 2014, Bitburger was my main account at Jung von Matt. Besides several ATL projects including TV, print and radio commercials, I was also the first-line contact person for all digital projects and campaigns. Of particular note here is the 360-degree campaign to coincide with the soccer World Cup 2014.

Please find a few work examples below.

FIFA World Cup 2014

Bitburger is one of the executive sponsors of the German national football team. For the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil (which Germany eventually won) we developed a huge all-embracing campaign covering all ATL and BTL media channels including a highly emotional TV spot and an extensive social media campaign.

For the tournament and this campaign we wanted to convey the close bond between the German national soccer team and its fans. While the whole country is suporting the players, everyone shares the excitement, emotion and ecstasy of the tournament. The slogan "Wenn aus 80 Millionen ein Team wird" translates into "When 80 million people come together as one team".

On Facebook we created various posts, covering the whole tournament. Thereby we focused on the games of the German national team, offering information about the next opponents as well as live-commenting during the games while using Bitburger products.

Besides the actual World Cup campaign, we developed the promotional Fan Force One campaign. Using a crown cap mechanism, customers could win an exclusive trip (flying in the Fan Force One airplane) to Brazil to witness a game of the German national team.

In total we worked almost a year on this campaign. Being a soccer fan myself, creating a campaign involving the German national team, the current world champion, was obviously an extremely exciting, informative and challenging task.

As the respective Account Manager, I was responsible for the overall organization and realization of this campaign.

This included everything from time planning and budget monitoring to daily customer and supplier contact as well as production preparation, execution and post-processing.

Sport sponsoring

Bitburger is not only sponsoring the German national team but also several clubs playing in the first and second Bundesliga. To strengthen this sponsorship, JvM creates new individual print commercials for the respective teams every year. They are photographed by Klaus Merz.

You can find a few examples below.

I was fully responsible for these campaigns.

Together with the accountable Art Director I visited every shooting, managed the entire production process starting with the first client briefing and ending with the delivery of the finished and approved visuals and got to know a couple of Bundesliga stars along the way.

Facebook — Creating content for over 500.000 people

With over 360.000 followers on Facebook, Bitburger has the largest community on the platform of all German breweries. We created weekly posts as well as more extensive social media campaigns to help build and maintain this large audience.

Besides content creation, we were also responsible for the continuous conceptual and strategic advancement of Bitburgers social media presence, for instance for new product launches, realignments, etc.

I was responsible for the day-to-day business including communicating (and sometimes mediating) between the clients and our designers and overseeing the budget as well as helping with the strategic advancements.