Insight
Alcohol distributors in the US are an important, but cynical bunch. They buy products from manufacturers like Jim Beam and put them into stores for sale to consumers. In the process, they convince retailers to give certain brands the best space on shelves. Distributors are motivated to prioritise brands with the highest levels of advertising support because of the potential for huge impact on sales, which puts more money in their pockets and gains them more influence with both manufacturers and retailers.
If you don't win over that constituency, nothing else can happen. However, they're not particularly savvy when it comes to media. This older group engages and identifies with traditional media like TV, Radio and OOH and wants their brands to do so as well. Starcom MediaVest's challenge was to get creative and show this group of people, who have built their personal success on the old ways of advertising, how times have changed.
Strategy
Demographically, distributors tend to not be digital natives and social and mobile media in particular are a mystery. So it’s difficult convincing them of the power and scale of social and mobile, the most effective way to reach and engage today’s 21+ legal age drinkers, the target audience for Jim Beam’s Basil Hayden Bourbon brand.
Starcom had to show them how an investment in social media really does make a meaningful connection with this audience. Jim Beam’s CMO asked the agency for help with his distributors. So Starcom seeked permission to conduct a social experiment on them. It was clear that the distributors would not change unless they could directly see how social media influenced behaviour and benefited their business. The experiment would unfold live at Jim Beams annual national Distributors meeting to bring to life the true power of social and rally their support for Basil Hayden’s Bourbon.
Execution
The experiment was a live demonstration of how social media brings the story of the party to life. Starcom tapped into some of the target audience’s most popular Instagrammers, a tight-knit and highly influential community of style leaders and popular taste-makers.
Using a 100% mobile platform, th agency put on a live Poker Party, featuring Basil Hayden’s Bourbon, bringing them together for a fun event that let them do what they do best – take photos, post stories and share. The video of the party was streamed live at the distributors meeting, along with a counter showing the number of impressions, comments and likes that were being earned in real time in social media.
The Poker Party spread all over the internet like wildfire, garnering huge results instantly, and gave definitive proof of the kind of experience social media can create.
Results
In just two hours, the event earned over 1.2 million impressions, 35,000 likes and generated 611 comments. five photos from the party organically made it onto Instagram’s “popular page” – a space that not even the richest of advertisers can buy - and the content also spread to Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.
In the week following the event, the high end food and entertaining site Bon Appetit picked it up and organically posted photos from it on their social feeds, growing impressions to over 2.3 million in a week. They not only proved the scalability of social media to cynical alcohol distributors, they also showed how it could take on a life of its own.
The CMO client was asked to share and re-share the poker party as part of a road show with all of Jim Beam’s field teams. His comments included, “I've never seen a presentation get more mileage!” Since then, they’ve been able to help the client increase their brands’ social media marketing efforts.