Asahi’s latest million-dollar advertising campaign features a barley crop from South Australia.
The Japanese beer company wanted to put its beer logo into a barley crop and found the perfect location in Hatherleigh.
Mike Cameron, director of Cameron Lock Surveying, has told ABC News he thought it was a prank when he got the phone call in December: “It was pretty out of the blue, asking us if we could put a beer logo into a barley crop. I thought it was a joke, Hamish and Andy ringing me or someone like that.”
Asahi wasn’t interested in using computer generated graphics, it wanted the real deal.
After finding the ideal crop, the Cameron Lock Surveying team had three weeks to map the paddock, scale the design up, getting the orientation right and trace it.
A UK company called Mazescape converted the logo into an image that could translate into GPS coordinates.
In early January, a crew of 40 people including drone operators, firefighters and the Cameron Lock team spent a week working to flatten the crop to create the giant logo, which measured 200m by 350m.
The Japanese symbols were the “trickiest part of the job” Nicholson said, with each one taking around half a day to get right.
After drones filmed the finished design, the crop was harvested, erasing all signs of the team’s work.
“All that for a 15-second ad,” Nicholson laughed. “But it looks fantastic.”
