“You can hide stuff in the closet and be embarrassed when somebody else brings it out or admit there have been some interesting things in your history,” says Sleeman, who has been the face of the brewery since relaunching the family business in 1988. (It rose through the ranks to become the No. 3 brewery in Canada before being sold to Japan’s Sapporo Brewing in 2006 for $400 million Canadian.)

"We decided not to sanitize our advertising. We’ve spoken about the quality of our beer for the last 20 years and its history but we haven’t gone into my family and the kind of characters we have in the family. Instead of commercials showing people driving across the prairies or girls in bikinis jumping up and down at a beach party, we decided to say, 'that’s my family’s history, we should have some fun with it.'"The “Notoriously Good” branding exercise goes as far back as the 16th century, when members of the Slyman family took to pirating in the Cornwall area of England. Rather than running their swords through enemies in the Caribbean, the Slyman pirates ran lights along the coast line to give ships the impression they were approaching a harbor. When the ships would invariably crash on the rocks, the Slymans would spring into action and rob the ships of their loot.

Eventually, the local authorities decided they could no longer turn a blind eye to such activity and the Slymans underwent a complete transformation. First, they changed the spelling of their name to Sleeman and then they began opening pubs in southwest England.

In the main television spot, one by one the various Sleemans and Slymans climb out of a box of Sleeman beer on to a stage. When Sleeman himself emerges at the end, he raises a bottle, looks around at his ancestors and says, “I love you guys.” In another, a pirate pops his head through the box of beer, pulls out a bottle and opens it with a bottle opener that has replaced the hook most pirates seem to have instead of a hand.

One branch of the family emigrated to Canada in 1830 and settled near St. Catharines in southern Ontario to brew beer. John H. Sleeman, the great, great grandfather of the present-day chairman, founded the original Sleeman brewery in 1834. (They moved to the Guelph area 20 years later because the water quality was better.)

The family continued to brew until 1933 when its liquor license was revoked for bootlegging, including smuggling beer into Detroit. One of their customers was American gangster, Al Capone.

“There is proof the family was smuggling to U.S. interests and Al Capone was one of the ones who was seen in Guelph. It’s not something we made up, it’s part of the family folklore,” he says.

Of course, not everybody in Sleeman’s family was a black sheep. His great, great grandfather was the first mayor of Guelph and he invested much of his own money in the city’s street car system, building the local opera house and fielding the city’s baseball team.

Robert Warren, a marketing professor at the I.H. Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba, is a big fan of “Notoriously Good.”

“It’s something that you’re not prepared for at all and the fact they do it in such a tongue-in-cheek manner is a really creative use of humour,” he says. “They create a persona behind the brand and because of that, they stick out in people’s minds.”

The campaign also serves to illustrate the not-so-upstanding history of the alcohol industry when bars were for men only and the only women around were either bar wenches or working in the world’s oldest profession upstairs, Warren says.

“If you use humour properly, it translates into sales. (Your brand) will be top of mind when people are thinking of a beer. If they want to try something new, that’s one thing that is going to filter through. ‘Let me just taste what this history is like,’” he says.

Beyond the cast of characters in the Sleeman family, Warren says smaller players have to do whatever they can to stand out on jam-packed beer store shelves. “You have to find a way to get people to try your product. The best way to do that is you have to stick out in some way in the consumer’s mind. Beers like Bud Light are playing for the mass audience whereas Sleeman is going after somebody who is willing to try something new,” he says.

Sleeman agrees. He says while “Notoriously Good” is a big budget production for his brewery, it’s small potatoes for Labatt and Molson Coors, Canada’s dominant breweries. “It’s a uniquely different campaign. Molson and Labatt don’t talk about the skeletons in their closets. We thought (doing so) would help us stand out in a crowded market and put a smile on people’s faces. Not only do we care about the quality of our product but we aren’t embarrassed to tell people about the history of our family,” he says.

Renée Alexander is a freelance business and lifestyle writer based in Winnipeg, Canada.