Steph Kitchin
Creative Director
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Victoria Bitter

Victoria Bitter social media campaign and TikTok launch.

Victoria Bitter 2025

Objective:
Increase brand love for Victoria Bitter in 18-25yo Australians.

Outcomes:
Meta: We kicked off 2025 with a Valentins campaign that had this traditionally ‘tradie’ beer showing up at an unexpectedly on Valentine’s Day.
TikTok: Victoria Bitter landed on the platform in May 2025 to welcome arms from our new younger fans, thanks to some native-to-platform creative executions.

Credits:
Creative Director: Steph Kitchin
Creative Team: Molly Robertson & Rowan Marsh-Croft
Photographer: Jack Gruber

Valentins

There are a surprising number of female VB fans. Some even share that fandom with their partners by bonding over their shared obsession with this heritage brand. Enter Valentins – Victoria Bitter’s first ever Valentine’s Day campaign. Rewarding Aussies for their heart earned thirst that goes into planning a special Valentine’s Day with a cute little 2-pack of tinnies. Your favourite beer with your favourite person – how good.

Breaking away from clichéd tradies and car mechanics, we brought this campaign into the living room of a young, beer-loving Brunswick couple. Cooking homemade pasta and playing scrabble on date night was a new realm for Victoria Bitter but a welcome one from the perspective of Gen-Z.  

We invited fans to enter to win an exclusive limited edition 2-pack of VB Valentins. The campaign rolled out across Meta with an engagement rate 560% above benchmark (measured against entire Asahi Beverages Beer Portfolio). On a shoe-string budget of $3.5k and 100% in-house production, the VB team was stoked with 402k paid reach and 1.5k competition entries.

 

Launching a 170yo beer brand on TikTok

The creative and media team here at Asahi 1house introduced VB to TikTok as carefully as introducing a toddler to broccoli. Brand content disguised as user generated content. TikTok being the sound-driven platform it is, we centered our campaign around the VB theme song from 1984. Bup bup bup ba-da-dup!

1house teamed up with Jack Archdale (AKA Jarchy) to remake the classic VB TVC in his own tone of voice. Jarchy ticked all the boxes – he has a huge TikTok following in the states that love VB, he’s a massive fan of VB which leads to authentic content, and his voice is as gravelly as a Dubbo driveway.  

With 11 million paid impressions and 30k clicks into the VB Theme sponsored sound you could say VB was welcomed to TikTok with open arms. The Paid Engagement Rate for the whole TikTok launch campaign doubled Asahi’s TikTok portfolio average, with Jarchy’s video almost tripling it. Given the campaign videos were mostly over 30 secs duration, we still had a 63% stronger View Through Rate than Asahi Beverages’ Beer Portfolio benchmark.  

Backing that TikTok launch moment up with our ‘Splitting the B’ post on St Patrick’s Day was a stroke of genius. This simple video garnered 80k organic views on TikTok and a Meta engagement rate 557% above benchmark, if you don’t mind. A couple of months in and this 170 year old beer brand is already hitting it’s stride on Gen-Z’s favourite social app. See below for these examples and more.