Education, education, education
Hive Mind Mead & Brew Co. is on a mission to modernise mead – the world’s oldest drink. A fantastic environmentally friendly food product, it suffers from a ‘monks and Vikings’ image that holds modern drinkers back from choosing it over the more familiar beers or ciders. Ahead of nationwide supermarket releases, Hive Mind therefore faces a brand perception challenge: find a way to educate the audience about the real benefits of drinking mead, and make it more than just a novelty purchase.
Value for the audience
Alongside being avid beekeepers and brewers, Hive Mind founders Kit and Matt also have a flair for performance and are naturals on camera. They have popped up on the small screen a few times in shows like Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh, The Hairy Bikers Go Local and Farmers Country Showdown so are used to being in the limelight. We tapped into this on-camera enthusiasm to produce a three-part factual web series for YouTube, giving the audience a combination of Inside The Factory-esque footage, alongside more community and nature-focused content similar to cooking and lifestyle shows.
Branded entertainment like this gives brands and audiences the best of both worlds. Hive Mind get to showcase its focus on food authenticity, and discuss its outlook on the major problems facing small food and drink businesses in the UK, and the audience gets something much more than just straight marketing.
The hive is buzzing
The series immediately scored Hive Mind a massive spike in YouTube following, more than tripling the subscriber count, and amassing more than 10,000 views for the cut-down content shared on other social media channels within two weeks of launch. The series has also set the stage for Hive Mind to deliver more content like this, and continue building a new audience that tune in to find out about the world of food and drink production from a source they trust.
Photo finish
Alongside the Youtube series, we also worked on a set of product photos to promote the launch of Hive Mind sparkling mead into the nation’s supermarkets. This is an ancient drink that we want audiences to see in a new way. So, with the product photography, we literally pictured the cans in a new way – at surprising angles with set dressing bursting with spring and summer vibes.
Mead is a fantastically sustainable and environmentally-friendly food product, one of the few that directly benefits biological diversity, as long as it’s done properly. Our goal is to use modern brewing techniques to encourage shoppers to make more ethical choices.
