Purpose: Gamified and engaging school-based alcohol social marketing programs have demonstrated effectiveness; however, wide-scale dissemination of these programs is limited by their resource-intensive character. The purpose of this paper is to address this limitation, a brief alcohol social marketing pilot program was derived from a comprehensive alcohol social marketing program to compare effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 115 14–16-year-old adolescents from six secondary schools participated in the brief alcohol social marketing pilot program. Program effectiveness was assessed using repeated measure analysis on adolescents’ knowledge, attitudes, social norms, self-efficacy and intentions to binge drink. Results were compared with the comprehensive social marketing program and a control group. Findings: The brief pilot program produced statistically significant outcomes for the same measures as the comprehensive program across attitudinal variables, descriptive norms and opportunistic self-efficacy. Research limitations/implications: Converting existing social marketing programs into brief alternates is more cost-effective and, in this case, demonstrated better outcome effects. However, findings are limited as in-depth comparisons were hindered by changes to content across program modes. No process for converting comprehensive programs into brief alternates was identified prior to this study, and therefore a number of considerations for program alteration were derived from program facilitator experiences. Originality/value: The findings provide initial evidence that a brief version of an existing comprehensive program can be an effective alternate to more resource-intensive programs under more cost-effective circumstances for program developers and facilitators.