The Speight’s Great Beer Delivery was conceived after Tim Ellingham, a kiwi fella living in London wrote an email to the Speight’s Beer company saying he was missing the cold Speight’s beer. Sending this guy a few dozen Speight’s beer wasn’t going to be enough. So the people at Speight’s came up with the most brilliant idea that’s come out of Godzone in a while, and that was to put a pub on a boat with volunteer crew members and sail them around the world to deliver some cold Speight’s beer in London. If you wanted to be part of this adventure and were interested in becoming a crew member, all you had to do was register your application on the Speight’s web site and convince them of your southern ways and values.

At the time The Speight’s Great Beer Delivery was announced, I thought WOW, that’s totally awesome! Now that’s one hell of a brilliant marketing idea that’s for sure. Good on ya Speight’s, I truly applaud you. You guys are geniuses. I would of totally been up for applying to be a crew member for this voyage of a lifetime, but unfortunately the timing was all wrong after recently becoming a mum. The reality is though, that I wouldn’t of been a good candidate since I don’t represent their southern ways.

The crew were chosen and all of the people chosen for the trip were guys. Now, I know that women applied, so come on Speight’s there is no excuse, you could of at least chosen a couple of girls for the crew? Anyway, on July 25^th 2007, the replica Speight’s Alehouse pub left Dunedin on its journey to London. The trip would take them to Samoa, the Panama Canal, the Bahamas, New York and London. Through the Great Beer Delivery web site you could watch the crews latest video diaries, read their blogs, send messages of support and even ask them questions. What I found a bit annoying about these video diaries on the web site is that you could only view the video at the one size and you were not given the option of being able to view the video in a larger format. You could also watch a weekly TV episode called ‘Crowd Goes Wild’ to keep up to date on where the boat was and what the crew had been up to.

There is a Speight’s Great Beer Delivery profile on MySpace which had 7462 views when I last looked. Unfortunately it looks like the MySpace presence for The Great Beer Delivery was a bit half hearted though. The reason I say this is because the blog entries here have not been kept up-to-date and there are only two videos appearing when you click on the profile video link. Also when you do a search for the Speight’s Great Beer Delivery within the MySpace videos category you get only one video available. I am not sure if this MySpace presence is an official Speight’s one or not. To be honest, it really just looks like some random person has taken it upon themselves to add the Speight’s profile and then they didn’t continue to update it. With only two Speight’s Great Beer Delivery videos having been posted on YouTube as well, maybe Speight’s could of used MySpace and YouTube as more of an online marketing tool.

I think that Speight’s could of really taken more advantage of their amazing idea of The Great Beer Delivery. They could of taken advantage of the fact that (1) it’s such a brilliant idea, (2) when it’s such a brilliant idea, people will talk about it. People will create a buzz in the social networking and social media sites. They could of harnessed this potential in their online marketing campaign. For example, all those video diary entries on the web site could of been posted on the the likes of YouTube and MySpace as well. This might of helped push the Speight’s brand even further and get more exposure for The Great Beer Delivery campaign.

Upon arrival in London and once they got the Alehouse on to dry land, there were seven nights of celebrations in the pub itself with free beer to be had, yes that’s right FREE BEER. All that the ex-pat New Zealanders living in London needed to do was register their details via the web site to become a UK Speight’s Mate. There were 700 tickets available for the lucky punters. The permanent location of the Speight’s Alehouse in London is above the Temple Tube station. You can check it out via Google maps.