The boss of BrewDog has paid 500,000 pounds (nearly Rs 5 crore) from his own pocket to winners of the company's misleading "solid gold" beer can promotion. In a LinkedIn post, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company, James Watt, said that he got personally carried away with the Willi Wonka-inspired promotion, in which his firm hid 50 gold cans in cases of beer in 2021. He admitted that he mistakenly believed the cans were actually made of solid gold, and not just plated with the precious metal.
The Scottish brewery ran the offer in 2020 in which the customers had the chance of winning gold cans and 15,000 pounds in BrewDog shares. Back then, James Watt shared three tweets saying customers could find "solid gold" cans hidden in cases of its beer.
However, according to the BBC, customers who found the gold cans complained that they were not, in fact, solid gold, as the company had claimed. Instead, the cans were made of mostly brass and only plated with gold, which customers said would decrease their value significance.
Now, taking to social media, Mr Watt apologised for the misleading claim. "I falsely thought the cans were made from solid gold when they were indeed only gold plated," he wrote. But he also added that the estimate of each can costing 15,000 pounds was accurate, despite the fact they were gold-plated.
"It was a silly mistake... I should have been more careful. I should have checked things before I got carried away. But it was too late," Mr Watt said in his post.
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Further, the CEO stated that things started to go wrong when the winners of the cans contacted the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates advertising and marketing in the UK, complaining that the "solid gold" claim was misleading. The ASA subsequently upheld the complaints about the marketing with the false claim appearing in three of 50 promotional tweets, according to Mr Watt.
Because of the mistake, Mr Watt said that he contacted each of the 50 winners who found a gold can and offered to give them the "full cash amount" if they were unhappy. "Furthermore, I promised to fund this myself so the business did not have to suffer financially from my mistake. All in all, it ended up costing me around 470,000 pounds - well over 2 and a half years 'salary," he said, adding that he now owns 40 of the gold cans.
