SORRY, NO CAN DO

Advertising watchdog raps Brewdog for its misleading ‘solid gold’ promo

BREWER Brewdog has been rapped by advertising watchdogs over a contest where customers won beer cans wrongly billed as being made of solid gold.

The firm launched two promotions where 15 of the cans were hidden in multipacks and it said each was worth £15,000.

However, it turned out the cans were gold plated and contained a tiny amount of the precious metal.

The Advertising Standards Authority has banned the ads – posted in November 2020 and February this year – after launching an investigation following 25 complaints.

The ASA said: “We considered a general audience was unlikely to be aware of the price of gold, how that would translate

Can and apology into the price of a gold can and whether that was inconsistent with the valuation as stated in the ad.

“We considered that because the awarded prize was not the same as that described in the ads, the promotion caused unnecessary disappointment to participants and therefore breached the code.”

Brewdog said the solid gold claim had been made in error and that it had publicly apologised.

However the firm, based in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, stood by its estimate that the winning cans were worth £15,000.

BrewDog said the promotional cans were plated in 24-carat gold.

The firm claimed a single 330ml can made with the equivalent 330ml of pure

gold would have been worth about $500,000 at the current gold price of $1800 per ounce.

They said they could not see “that any reasonable consumer who entered the competition would assume they were going to win over half-a-million dollars of gold”.