BrewDog CEO James Watt paid out almost £500,000 after a misleading 'solid-gold' beer can promotion was reported to regulators.
The promotion involved customers being given the chance to win 'solid-gold' beer cans in packs of its popular beer.
However, customers began to question the 2021 promotion after finding out the cans were in fact gold plated.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) received 25 complaints, upholding them in October of 2021.
BrewDog boss James Watt that that he has made "some costly mistakes" in the promotion, adding that he "misunderstood the process of how they were made."
He said that he "falsely thought" the cans were made from solid gold.
In a post published on LinkedIn, he said: "Those were 3 very expensive mistaken tweets that I sent out in my enthusiasm for our new campaign."
Adding: "The Gold Can saga was headline news. We were made to look dishonest and disingenuous and we took a real hammering online and in the press.
Deservedly so. My initial tweets had been misleading and we deserved the flak."
Due to the error, Mr Watt said he contacted all 50 gold can winners to offer them the "full cash amount" as an alternative to the prize if they were unhappy.
He said: "All in all, it ended up costing me around £470,000 - well over 2 and a half years' salary."
In his post, he revealed that he now owns 40 gold-plated beer cans.
After its investigation into the promotion, the ASA said that while there were complaints over the advert's authenticity, some questioned the claimed value of the cans at £15,000.
The ASA said that a single 330ml can made from pure gold would be valued at around £363,000.
Despite this, the watchdog said that most customers would be unlikely to know this and still think the cans were pure gold.
BrewDog has received criticism for its marketing practices in the past with one advert last year being banned after claiming its fruit-flavoured beverages constituted "one of your five a day."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here