By GREGORY ZELLER //
The 2024 Craft Beer Marketing Awards are in the can, with the born-on-Long Island competition extending its international reach to spread high honors among a world of admirable, sometimes audacious advertising ideas.
The fifth-annual contest invited multiple craft-beverage types – beers, ciders, hard seltzers, ready-to-drink cocktails and others – to throw down in more than 20 marketing-related categories, with 227 total awards presented to brewers, designers and marketing agencies. The competition attracted a global gallery of competitors and judges, many of whom tuned in for a virtual awards ceremony streamed April 18 on Facebook.
Hosted by contest creators Jim McCune and Jackie DiBella-Curry – executive director and account manager, respectively, at Melville-based marketing house EGC Group – the livestream doled out 90 Platinum Crushies, 96 Gold Crushies and 41 Global Crushies, with winners collecting the now-distinctive “Crushie” trophies (fully functional tap handles shaped like a hand crushing a beer a can, created by Alabama-based Steel City Tap Co.).
DiBella-Curry: Tastes great, highly competitive.
DiBella-Curry applauded the “toughest competition” to date, with entries pouring in from across the United States and around the world and hundreds of international judges selecting the winners. In the final tally, Pennsylvania emerged as the top U.S. State (23 winners), followed by California (18) and Florida (16).
New York State piled up a respectable 12 Crushies – only two went to Long Island-based competitors – while other winners hailed from Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Guatemala, Ecuador, Scotland and the Ukraine.
That’s an impressive spread – especially, organizers noted, for a contest that began five short years ago as a fairly localized marketing competition.
“We were so impressed by the sheer creativity, innovation and caliber of marketing displayed in entries this year in every category,” McCune said. “More than 600 industry professional judges from around the world had their work cut out for them.”
The two Long Island trophies both went to Farmingdale brand-builder Moverz Media Group, which captured a Gold Crushie in the Best Marketing Collateral/Original Video Content: Craft Beer category for a humorous video promoting Pineapple Invasion Ale, a concoction of the STATTfest music and art festival and Farmingdale’s Lithology Brewing Co.
Moverz also captured a Gold Crushie for a video produced in conjunction with the Long Island Brewers Guild celebrating the winners of the first beer-soaked Hidden Treasure LI campaign.
Pirated video: A Moverz Media Group/Long Island Brewers Guild short covering the first-ever Hidden Treasure LI campaign was honored with a Gold Crushie.
Several winners hailed from various upstate locales and from New York City – including a coveted Platinum Crushie for Manhattan-based marketing experts M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, which designed the Best Logo Design/Use of Icon or Mascot: Craft Beer on behalf of Seattle-based Elysian Brewing.
The Ukrainian award went to Dnipro-based beermaker MOVA Brewing Co., which – despite that nation’s ongoing war with Russian invaders – kept its good humor and captured a Platinum Crushie in the Best Marketing Collateral/Original Video Content category.
Other winners of note include celebrity chef Guy Fieri and his friends at Connecticut’s Two Roads Brewing Co., which launched the ready-to-drink Flavortown Spiked Fruit Punch in 2023. The partners won three Crushies: Platinum in the Best RTD Can Label Design category, Gold in the Best RTD Can Label Design/Use of Illustration category and a Global Crushie for Best RTD Logo Design/Use of Icon or Mascot.
Name it: This will be the last year of the Craft Beer Marketing Awards — starting in 2025, the global competition will be officially known as the Craft Beverage Marketing Awards.
The full list of 2024 winners – in categories covering can and bottle labels, can and bottle packaging, brand refreshes and much more – is available here.
While the ice has barely melted on this year’s competition, organizers are already getting busy with next year’s installment, preparing for early-bird entries and judge-recruitment efforts in the coming months – and unveiling a slight name change that better reflects the nature of the evolving annual contest.
“After five years of fine-tuning the CBMAs into a highly successful world-class awards program, we’re excited to further commit to our inclusion of multiple craft beverage types by announcing a slight, but important, change in our name,” DiBella-Curry said. “For our 2025 season, we’ll officially be known as the Craft Beverage Marketing Awards, hoping to attract even more amazing work across the craft industry.”
