Pabst Blue Ribbon, near-dead in 2001, was revived on word of mouth alone.

In 2001 Pabst Blue Ribbon was all but dead: it headed for under a million barrels that year, capping 23 straight years of decline, against 20 million barrels a year in the 1970s.

Brand manager Neal Stewart and a young word-of-mouth shop in Atlanta, Fizz, run by Ted Wright, took the account with a near-zero budget and a rule that there be no advertising of any kind.

Digging through sales data, they found five cities, from Portland to Pittsburgh, where the beer was quietly growing among early hipsters rebelling against yuppie parents, people who craved cheap, unpretentious, authentic things.

Instead of ads the team seeded tiny scenes, sponsoring bike-messenger races, gallery openings, skating parties and even a Mini Kiss tribute band, and the beer grew as that tribe carried it across the country.

PBR grew a combined 55% by 2006, nearly doubled its volume and rose at least 10% in every state after 23 years of decline.

The beer was cheap and unpretentious, precisely what a counter-culture wanted.

Having never seen a PBR ad made it feel authentic rather than marketed.

Word of mouth let a tiny budget reach just the influential few.

Sponsoring niche events created stories people wanted to retell.

When a brand has no ad money, the honest fix is to hand influential people a story worth repeating instead of buying attention.

By 2014 PBR had become shorthand for hipster culture, and Pabst Brewing was sold to an investment group that preserved the no-marketing ethos; the 'marketing of no marketing' playbook became a widely cited case.