Never Skim An Erdinger – Save The Best Bit
In December 2019 we were contacted by Martin Bayerl of Bayerl & Partner Film in Munich to quote as the service production company on a campaign for Erdinger beer, featuring the Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp.
Our new German clients had little knowledge of the North West, let alone the services production industry here, so entrusting us with the contract was a huge privilege. Director Han Steinbichler later told us that we had won the job, despite the competition, because our quote was fair and our integrity struck a chord with them. It also didn’t hurt that they respected our status as new parents. From that moment on, the values of Four Cheers were born.
So in early 2020, we helped Martin and Erdinger produce a comprehensive package that included a moving image commercial, social media campaign and stills shoot.
We scouted some standout locations and when asked to provide a Premier League football pitch within spitting distance of our hero pub, we were able to do so by hiring the junior school pitch next door, lighting it with six half dinos whilst strategically positioning a group of football fans on a rostra behind Klopp as he yelled encouragement to his ‘fictional’ players in the defocused foreground. It is amazing what can be done with a long lens and some imagination.
Given how passionate the Germans – and specifically Erdinger – are about their beer, the whole commercial rightly revolved around maintaining the head of the pulled pint…so as well as selecting a stellar crew, we tracked down the best beer stylist in the country!
Although it was all about the beer, the joint star of the show was, of course, the great Jurgen Klopp. Throughout the shoot he was warm, funny, charismatic and completely authentic. He had the crew eating out of the palm of his hand and the laughs he gets at the end of the commercial are completely genuine. We like to believe that we contributed to the atmosphere that made that possible.
We weren’t to know that these successes were to be a false start and that just three months later, the world would be plunged into a global pandemic. So we hunkered down and waited for the world to turn.
Then in late 2021, Martin Bayerl contacted us again to say that Erdinger wanted to reshoot the Never Skim An Erdinger commercial because Kloppo, as the Germans call him, had ditched his glasses in favour of contact lenses. Furthermore, they wanted to shoot two additional commercials in anticipation of the delayed 2022 World Cup.
So we remounted the commercial and set up the shoot for December 2021. Once again we provided all the infrastructure for the commercial, stills shoot and social media campaign, except this time, Mr Bayerl took us aside and enquired about our script consultancy credentials. He asked us to take a look at the scripts for the new campaign and polish them up, which we did one Saturday afternoon with our five-month-old daughter asleep on the couch next to us.
So huge thanks go to Martin Bayerl, Hans Steinbichler, and the good people at Erdinger for supporting us in the creation and launch of Four Cheers Productions.