CUB-owned Great Northern Brewing Co has launched its latest marketing campaign, saying it is celebrating far-north Queensland through a ‘more inclusive lens’.

The $5 million nationwide campaign launched yesterday with advertisements placed in more than 80 locations around the country.

CUB’s Queensland regional sales director Mick McKeown said in a media release that Great Northern’s heartland is in north Queensland and that the recent floods and fires have made it tough on the State.

“We hope the campaign will give the beer and local far-north Queensland tourism a boost,” McKeown said.

“We’re hoping someone sitting in their car on a rainy day in Melbourne or Sydney will look up at a Great Northern billboard and think, ‘I’m going to head there’ to have a cold beer’.”

The billboards feature photographs of two men and one woman enjoying different facets of tropical north Queensland’s great outdoors.

Taken by Sunshine Coast adventure photographer Krystle Wright, the campaign has been designed to be inclusive.

Great Northern senior marketing manager Antonia Ciorciari said in a media release that the brewery has recognised for a while that women were enjoying Great Northern.

According to research commissioned by the brewery, the emergence of easier-drinking beers in recent years, including Great Northern, has led to more women trying beer.

The research, conducted by Kantar Consulting, included statistics on beer consumption over the past four weeks by women by age group. The survey included 4,000 male and female participants.The research also showed that about 78 per cent of women think beer advertising talks more to men than women.

Ciorciari said the brewery has tried to rectify that.

“It’s not groundbreaking or a first for the beer industry, but we feel our campaign is heading in the right direction,” she said.

“Our new billboards will feature a woman enjoying a Great Northern to echo what is happening in the community.”

Beer advertising expert Michael Bannenberg said that Great Northern’s decision to feature women in its advertisements is nothing new to him.

“Most breweries understand that women are an untapped market,” Bannenberg explained.

“It’s not about equality, it’s more about how much product they can sell.”

Bannenberg said that women have been one of the biggest challenges for beer marketers.

“They have had to learn how to communicate with women to get them to change their product preferences.”

Bannenberg highlights the beer advertisements of the 1930s and 60s, saying that women have always been marketed to.

“Beer marketers realised that women had the power in the home,” he explained.

Women have often fulfilled the role of grocery shopper, giving them the purchasing power.

Bannenberg said that the ways marketers shape their advertisements are “a social reflection or a social consequence of what’s going on at the time”.

For Bannenberg, no brewery has yet figured out what women want.