Martens BeLite
Overview
Turning rivals into drinking buddies.
A visit to the Martens brewery museum in Belgium set Buffalo Rock President and CEO Matthew Dent on a 15-year path toward bringing the family-owned brewer’s nine-generation legacy to American drinkers.
Martens brought the brewing expertise. Buffalo Rock helped shape the product for the American market. Together, they created Martens BeLite, a crisp Belgian light beer with 90 calories and 2.2 grams of carbs. But in one of beer’s most crowded categories, pedigree and product claims alone wouldn’t make a new name stand out.
Lewis was brought in to position BeLite, build its launch platform and introduce the beer to America.
Brand Strategy & Creative
BeLite needed to quickly grow awareness and turn it into movement at the shelf. That meant finding an idea that could build name recognition while giving the new beer a point of view.
Lewis answered with a simple, ownable invitation: It’s time to BeLite. The Rivals campaign brought it to life through familiar adversaries—hunter and deer, knight and dragon, shark and surfer—sharing unexpectedly easygoing moments over a BeLite.
Simple, surreal and instantly understood, the campaign made the name memorable and turned “BeLite” into a way of looking at the world.
The Campaign
Rivals gave BeLite a flexible platform for advertising, social, retail, point-of-sale and the product launch. The creative campaign took the brand strategy behind It’s time to BeLite and made it easy to spot wherever the brand showed up — from posters and social posts to earned media and the retail shelf.
New pairings could extend the campaign while preserving its recognizable structure: tension gives way to an unexpectedly lighter moment over a BeLite.
Early Recognition
Within three months of the campaign launch, BeLite began turning widespread attention into a measurable retail movement. Lewis’ earned media strategy generated coverage across 22 outlets in advertising, business and local media, including Advertising Age, Brewbound, Roastbrief, and Bham Now, helping introduce BeLite’s new point of view to audiences well beyond its initial distribution footprint.
That visibility also showed up at the point of sale. BeLite unit sales in Alabama grew 17.4%, making it one of only five beer brands posting growth in a declining category.