North End microbrewery actually paying customers to drink beer

Good Robot’s unique ‘Become a Micro-Influencer’ campaign will run until November 14 or as the microbrewery’s co-owner Joshua Counsil says, ‘until bankruptcy’

HALIFAXtoday \  Steve Gow

At the risk of sounding either like the deal of the century or pure satire, a local brewery is looking to pay beer drinkers to buy their product.

North End’s micro-brewing company Good Robot has launched a unique promotional campaign entitled Become a Micro-Influencer in which the Robie Street business will pay $1 to anyone who takes a photograph with their product and posts it on the social media website Instagram.

“We were expressing concerns about the influencer culture in that we thought we have the largest social media following of customers in the province for a beverage company,” says Joshua Counsil, one of Good Robot Brewing Company’s co-founders.

He adds the issue of paying select influencers to showcase products came up during a meeting with fellow co-owners Angus Campbell and Doug Kehoe and the brewery’s creative agency, Wunder.  “(The agency) said what if we do a micro-influencer (promotion) since you are a microbrewery and turn everyone into an influencer and give everyone the power to create content.”

The trio loved the idea and decided to create the campaign which flips the notion of the influencer — people with massive followings who earn money through endorsing products through their social media pages — on its head by paying only those with less than 10,000 followers to endorse Good Robot beer.

“We still work with those folks too,” admits Counsil, adding that they recently sponsored an influencer in British Columbia with a transgender partner who inquired about their Pride-dedicated THEMBOT beer. “So we do work with traditional influencers as well — we just loved the idea of turning the table and giving everyone the authority to do it.”

With the Become a Micro-Influencer campaign, participants of legal drinking age simply need to post a photo or video on Instagram with one of Good Robot’s eligible products. If they tag the photo to Good Robot and include other suggested tags, those so-called micro-influencers will be contacted by the brewery directly with payment details.

“You are limited to one post per eligible beverage per week,” adds Counsil. “So if you wanted to get each of those, you can do a post four times a week — one per beverage — and you can do it the next week if you like too.”

Although paying people to drink beer may seem generous, Counsil notes that the season has been very tough on Good Robot as well as other craft breweries across the province.

“It’s been a really, really rough summer – the numbers have been really bad,” says Counsil, adding that a lack of tourism and COVID-19 hesitancy as well as a sluggish period of e-commerce has slowed business. “The way we look at it is we have to get scrappy with our ideas and try to squeeze more out of less and sometimes a really fun, stupid, talkable idea is a really good one.”

However, Good Robot has never been the type of company to rely on traditional forms of advertising or promotion. In addition to such socially-conscious initiatives as the brewery’s Good Will Partners fundraising campaign, Good Robot has always promoted itself through videos and online platforms.

“I think of advertising and promotions as entertain first and then create awareness from that,” says Counsil. “You can create brand salience, you can create brand awareness — I really like talkable pieces. Billboards and cans and all these things are an avenue for creativity and the reason why most people don’t like advertising is because most people do it in a pretty boring way.”

While Good Robot’s latest promotion is certainly inventive, the Become a Micro-Influencer campaign won’t come without some associated risks for the microbrewery.

“Let’s just say that our CFO is not happy with this promotion,” laughs Counsil, who recognizes budgeting the three-month campaign is a challenge.

“The budgetary piece is a question mark and you have to assume a certain amount of folks are going to participate and then not too many are going to try to find loopholes around it,” says Counsil. “But fundamentally it’s really just a fun, kind of stupid, talkable campaign which is right up our alley.”