Background
Turtle Lake Brewing Company is one of Hanoi’s most beloved venues. Situated in a one-of-a-kind location, the brewery features a large, shaded patio beyond which sit its gleaming fermentation tanks that face out toward the shore of West Lake, directly across the street. Indeed, to spend an evening at Turtle Lake is to escape for a moment from the traffic and construction of Hanoi, and to wash away the day with a gulp of craft beer made right here in Vietnam’s capital.
For years Turtle Lake has served the community, opening its space for beer festivals, Christmas Markets and drag brunches. It’s not uncommon to stop in for a quick drink and find a live band performing. This is what has always made Turtle Lake special: it’s a place to gather and meet like minded folks, whether Vietnamese or foreign.
Following a long summer lockdown in 2021 that left nearly every restaurant in the country idle for months on end, Turtle Lake wanted to reopen with renewed energy, including on social media, which is where Fourdozen comes in.
Our Big Idea
Working with Turtle Lake’s team, we developed a content strategy to resurrect the long-dormant social media properties Turtle Lake had been keeping on life support during the pandemic. We emphasized some of the aspects that make Turtle Lake special: community engagement, big flavors, and, of course, the beer, brewed by Vietnam’s first female brewmaster.
Inspired by the welcoming community at Turtle Lake—one which stands out for being explicitly inclusive of Hanoi’s LGBT community—we developed the “We are Hanoi” campaign which celebrates the diversity of Turtle Lake and its community by promoting pride in one’s self and identity. Given that this campaign was about the people as much as the venue, we supported it with regular event photography featuring the smiling faces of Turtle Lake patrons, and the beautifully designed bottles of their craft beer. Eager to communicate to an audience still hesitantly peeking their heads out from under lockdowns and quarantines, we supplemented this with in-the-moment story content of frothy beers being pulled at the tap, set to the Turtle Lake soundtrack, like clockwork every Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Because Turtle Lake is all about participation, and because they are open to experimentation, we also added some interactive fun to the mix. We designed a “bottle hunt” mini-campaign that promised a free drink to anyone who could identify the locations around Hanoi where we took photos of the brewery’s beers.
