Who Is Ron Stablehorn?

Ron Stablehorn is the brilliant solution to a simple problem. In 2006, Rolling Rock was an independent brewery with a passionate, but small following. Then it was bought by beer giant Anheuser Busch. The fear from fans was that the Rolling Rock legacy and personality would be perverted by the Anheuser Busch marketing machine. They would turn it into another Bud Light, with low brow humour and bikini babes.

How Rolling Rock addressed this issue was brilliant. Instead of trying to prove that this wouldn’t happen, they embraced this negative opinion. So what did they do? They created TV spots featuring the Rolling Rock “VP of Marketing” Ron Stablehorn. The ads were a PSA-style apology for a series of terrible ads that they had run and now pulled from the air. He apologized for ads featuring party guerrillas, man thongs and multiple baseball-to-the-groin hits. He even appeared on an interview on Spike TV to address these commercials.

So what did this do? It made millions of Americans (and at least one Canadian) wonder what the commercials that were “pulled off of the air” looked like. So they went to YouTube. And saw something like this:

The Pool Party

The Baseball Game

The results? They had 5.5 million hits on YouTube. And a total of 11.5 million video impressions. The best thing about it was that every one of the people who saw the video online had to actively find it. It wasn’t a passive interaction. It was engaging. Rolling Rock teased everyone with an idea on television and relied on people’s curiosity to drive them online. Brilliantly executed.

- Christian