As it is in the U.S., so it is in Slovakia: no glass bottles are allowed in hockey arenas, and for the most obvious reasons. Playing hockey is rough enough without players getting bonked by flying bottles that then shatter on the ice.
But the ban was turned into opportunity by one smart-thinking ad agency, Istropolitana D’Arcy, which happened to represent Topvar, a Slovakian beer.
The best ad imaginable for the beer-maker would be the sight of thousands of fans in the stands lifting bottles of Topvar to their lips. So copywriter Katarina Popravcova came up the idea of creating trumpets--plastic megaphones of sorts--that looked like bottles of Topvar beer.
Crews then showed up at hockey games and handed out the Topvar trumpets to fans to cheer on their teams.
So when TV viewers tuned into a hockey game they saw rows of fans lifting what looked like bottles of Topvar.
“Trumpet-hooting and beer-drinking look similar from distance, so it is enough that the trumpet looked like a beer bottle,” says Martin Toman, an account executive at Istropolitana D’Arcy. “And so the beer trumpet was born.”
