Australian beer company Mountain Goat has launched its latest campaign, mostly involving phone conversations with farm animals.

In an effort to build communication with their customers, many companies employ call centres – human-supported and otherwise – to cater to complaints, inquiries, customer support and the like.

Melbourne-based Mountain Goat Beer’s new call centre is a deliberately borderline useless activity for customers to enter the running to win either a year’s worth of beer or a visit to its Melbourne brewing site.

The campaign involves a call to ‘13 Goat’, where one is greeted with, “Welcome to 13 Goat,” followed by a short bah, “a marketing gimmick ran by goats.”

Participants are then offered the options of pressing one to speak to a goat, pressing two to speak to different goat, pressing three to bah, pressing four “if you don’t have time for marketing gimmicks”, pressing five to open a virtual beer and so on.

The Monkeys Melbourne chief creative officer, Ant Keogh comments,“After dealing with faceless, computerised call centres, you’ll find one operated by goats a pleasant surprise.”

According to Mountain Goat, the interactive phone experience designed by The Monkeys includes more than 170 possible scenarios as participants navigate by dialing digits – including speaking to screaming goats and listening to an episode of ‘Goats of our Lives’. Once participants are finished with call, they’ll receive a text message with the details of how to enter the competition.

“While craft beer continues its strong growth, there are still thousands of drinkers out there who want to take the leap but really just want a simple, uncomplicated beer that is very enjoyable,” says Mountain Goat Beer marketing manager, Marc Slater. “A clever marketing gimmick should support such a beer.”

The campaign is set to run for the entirety of March 2019 with support through social, OOH and radio on Australia’s East coast.

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