Last week the brand, which is marketed and distributed by Molson Coors Brewing Company in the UK, unveiled a £13m marketing campaign which introduces the strapline, ‘Taste. Amplified.'
From October 5, the activity, targeting 18-34-year-old men will run across outdoor, press and online but will not be making an appearance on the small screen.
Over the summer InBev brands such as Stella Artois and Budweiser have taken similar routes. Although its 4% variant has had TV backing, the original 5% variant dropped its period-style ads for creative embracing the swinging 60s, slightly strangely allied with the lager's green credentials.
However it chose to communicate this radical new positioning through outdoor, press and a heavy online strand.
Andreas Hilger, the InBev UK marketing director, also chose outdoor and press for his first ad campaign on Budweiser following the acquisition of Anheuser-Busch.
He said that the media choice was linked to the theme of the campaign, ‘Good times are out there'.
‘The heavyweight campaign was designed to really dominate illuminated large- scale outdoor sites, this combined with the more innovative digital out-of-home media and targeted press within city centres made sure Budweiser was top of mind for the target consumer,' said Hilger.
Molson Coors marketing director Simon Davies said his company is spending more on outdoor across its brands than it ever has done previously. He offers a number of reasons as to why lager brands may be thinking twice about splashing out on TV advertising.
Davies said that while the cost of TV as a medium may have come down the same has not happened to production costs so marketers are questioning how much bang they are getting for their buck.
Specific to the lager market is the fact that the typical consumer, 18-34-year-old males are watching less TV, he added. ‘What you are finding with young adult males is that TV is becoming a less effective medium for reaching them. They are probably the group that's most hit by the fragmentation of media.'
ITV losing ‘event TV' such as Formula 1 has just contributed to the problem, Davies argued.
It would be an exaggeration to say that lager brands have completely lost faith in using TV to promote their products. As a way of building an emotional connection it is still up hard to beat, Carling's ‘You know who your mates are', campaign is a good example of this. However as young men turn off and tune out it seems there will be ever more beer ads on the tube, outdoor poster sites and spread across the nation's newspapers.
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