Advertising veteran and 2019 B&T Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jane Evans has reflected on the brutal backlash from an agency to her original design for what would eventually become Australia’s first major craft beer brand.
Speaking during her session What’s A Sheila Got To Do To Get A Beer Around Here? at Cairns Crocodiles, held at Hemingway’s Brewery, Evans recalled how agency and client executives initially rejected the early branding work for what would later become James Squire.
“I still have all the original sketches of my very first designs,” Evans told the audience. “We presented them to the client, and they fucking hated it. They were so angry.”
At the time, Evans had recently joined creative agency Principals and was tasked with developing a premium beer brand for brewer Lion Nathan.
But according to Evans, both the agency and client were expecting something visually closer to traditional premium beer branding like Crown Lager — conservative, gold and familiar.
Instead, Evans’ work broke category conventions.
“The agency wanted ‘premium beer’ to look like every other premium beer,” she said.
Six months later, however, the exact same presentation was revived by brewery executive Tom Carroll and pitched directly to Lion Nathan CEO Gordon Cairns as “the future of beer”.
“Nothing changed about the work,” Evans explained. “Just who was looking at it.”
The brand would eventually launch in 1998 and go on to become one of Australia’s defining craft beer success stories, helping reshape the local beer market long before craft brewing became mainstream.
For Evans, the experience exposed a broader problem inside agencies: originality often gets mistaken for failure because it challenges familiar category rules.
“When you’re inside a category for too long, anything different feels wrong,” she said.
She said agencies frequently confuse comfort with correctness, protecting legacy codes rather than recognising the ideas capable of shifting an entire market.
“The most original ideas are usually the ones people initially think are off-brand or offensive to the rules,” she said.
“But that’s normally the first sign you’re actually changing the category.”
Evans also reflected on the irony of becoming one of Australia’s leading beer marketers despite personally disliking beer at the time.
“I f**king hate beer,” she laughed. “I was pregnant when I first got the account, and breastfeeding for 18 months.”
Despite that, Evans said her outsider perspective became one of the brand’s greatest advantages.
Rather than copying established beer advertising, the team deliberately did “the complete opposite” of what major brewers were doing.
One example was creating fitted women’s promotional T-shirts instead of the oversized shirts commonly handed out in pubs at the time – a move Evans said helped drive demand among female bar staff and customers.
“We got distribution because women started asking for the shirts,” she said.
Evans also used the session to criticise the advertising industry’s tendency to dilute ideas through endless revisions and stakeholder compromises.
“If they don’t like it, they say they don’t like it. Fight for it if you believe in it, or move on and do something else,” she said.
“All of this ‘can you tweak this, can you tweak that?’ – that kills the work.”
