Inside the campaign: Carling’s Made Local

Miranda Osborne, brand director at Carling, discusses its Made Local campaign, how the brand is using PR to promote the campaign and what success looks like.

How long have you been at Carling and what does your role encompass?

I’ve been brand director at Carling since 2017, overseeing and driving Carling’s brand strategy.

You’ve recently launched the Made Local campaign. Can you give a brief explanation of what the campaign is about?

At Carling, we’re proud to be made local. The Made Local campaign is about championing and supporting those people who are making things happen in their hometown, just like Carling. Proud of what they are doing and proud to be from the place they are doing it.

What does Carling hope to achieve from the campaign?

We hope to see more people come together over shared passions within local groups and communities.

We also want to utilise our platform as Britain’s number one beer to bring attention to some of the fantastic things happening in communities all over the UK, it really is inspiring to see the wonderful things people do.

Why is the Made Local Fund important to you?

The fund is something very close to my heart. I’m from a small market town that like many others, tends to suffer from a talent drain as people move to bigger surrounding cities. The fund really enables people to achieve their goals regardless of where they’re from and I’m so proud to see the difference it has made to peoples’ lives.

It celebrates a generation’s ambition to make things happen in their own backyard, projects that bring people together over shared passions and create opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

What are the key PR and comms aspects of the campaign and how do these complement the other parts of the activation?

The PR amplification of the Made Local above-the-line campaign focuses on driving applications to the Made Local Fund. It does this by championing local examples of the fund in action through regional media and on social. We have lots more exciting PR and comms activity to come as the campaign develops.

How will you look to measure the effectiveness of Made Local?

We collate a lot of data in order to effectively report on the success of the campaign. We measure everything from engagements to volume of conversations and sentiment. We will also look at how many applications have been made to the Made Local Fund. The more applications we receive, the more communities we can support and the more effective we can be.

Finally, how important is it for campaigns to resonate on a local level? Has this changed in importance and how can brands go about creating campaigns which achieve this?

It’s very important for brands to resonate on a local level – but for Carling as Britain’s number one beer, with drinkers all over the country – it’s imperative. Brands need to understand what drives their audience and find ways to connect with them in a relevant way.

For Made Local, it started with our experience of being brewed locally for generations and the positive impact the brewery and our people have in our local community. We then looked at Carling as a nationally loved lager and what we could uncover about other local communities that might sometimes be overlooked.