Budweiser: Buds For Buds [video]

Credits & Description:

Category: Beverage
Media: Online
Company: Gratafy
Client: Anheuser-Busch
Brand: Budweiser
Company: Gratafy + AKQA, Seattle
Target: USA · North America
Cofounder and COO: Ryan Halper, Gratafy
Cofounder and CEO: Brian Erke, Gratafy
Client Partner: Allison Gabrys, AKQA
Account Director: Brett Anderson, AKQA
Head of Creative Technology - Creative Shop Studio: Chris Jones, Facebook
Creative Strategist : Nathan Reuss, Facebook
Digital Innovation Manager: Mike Raspatello , Anheuser Busch Inc.
Language: English (US)
Objectives: Awareness, Preference, Intent, Online Traffic, Offline Traffic, Sales, Recommendation, Product Launch, Direct Response, Product Development
Tags: Beverage, North America, English (US), Awareness, Preference, Intent, Online Traffic, Offline Traffic, Sales, Recommendation, Product Launch, Direct Response, Product Development, Online  
Campaign Description
Share a real beer with a friend, no matter where they are.
AN AMERICAN ICON
Budweiser has been an American icon for almost 150 years. But for younger drinkers, that’s the problem: it feels dated and no longer relevant.
AN AGE-OLD TRADITION
These days, we spend more time online with friends than we do in person.
But buying a beer for a bud remains as relevant today as it was in 1876.
A NEW WAY TO CONNECT
Buds for Buds is a mobile experience that lets friends share beers from anywhere across the country or the globe – through Facebook, text, or email. The campaign helped friends connect online in a meaningful way, and brought an American icon into the digital age.
PRODUCT CHALLENGE:
How do you create a user experience that seamlessly transitions a user from Facebook Newsfeed activation, to multi-player mobile commerce conversion with social sharing, to on-premise/point-of-sale product fulfillment?
AUDIENCE:
Millennials of legal drinking age in the US who are friends with millennials of legal drinking age in Denver or Chicago (markets for the initial live fulfillment bars).
OBJECTIVE:
Make Budweiser more relevant to millennials, introduce the product to new consumers through peer-to-peer word of mouth endorsement (gifting), and drive incremental on-premise purchases at bars through a new online channel.
Campaign Overview Site: http://thevoted.com/budweiser/...
Campaign Goals
What we did: Buds for Buds was built explicitly around Facebook through a vision conceived by Anheuser Busch (ABI), Facebook Creative Shop, and agency AKQA to enable a new consumer behavior by applying Facebook's ubiquity to an age old tradition: buying a friend a beer to celebrate.
Why we did it: The Buds for Buds team believed we should be able to connect with friends through Facebook in even deeper, richer ways by bridging the digital and real world experience. By combining Facebook with Gratafy's hospitality-focused technology platform, we crossed this bridge. For the first time in history, the Buds for Buds campaign enabled consumers to purchase a Budweiser directly from budweiser.com and send it to a friend over Facebook, to be redeemed in a bar of the recipient’s choosing. Everybody wins: consumers have a new way to elevate their online conversations from sharing digital content to sharing physical content (a beer in a bar), ABI gains a new transactional channel for distribution, and Merchants (bars and restaurants) gain a new category for commerce.
How we did it: Consumers were activated via targeted ads on Newsfeed depending on whether they were of legal drinking age and had "friends in Chicago or Denver of LDA" - a unique filter that only Facebook could provide. Using a mobile-web iFrame app hosted by Gratafy, consumers entering Buds for Buds from Newsfeed on their mobile device were able to stay inside the Facebook mobile app, providing a seamless and trusted user experience. To reduce friction, ABI was also able to authenticate the user's age via Facebook rather than having to prompt a form. Users then connected with Facebook to see a list of friends to whom they could send a beer, and were able to share the ‘moment’ on Timeline. Recipients of a beer were notified via Facebook and used Facebook login to to easily authenticate and claim the beer for immediate or future redemption at the bar from their phone through an experience powered by Gratafy.
Campaign Performance
Through Gratafy’s merchant partnerships and proprietary POS integrations, we were able to track key redemption metrics giving ABI unprecedented insight into the success of the campaign at the last mile (beer redemption on-premise).
At the core, the objective was to drive Budweiser penetration and on-premise product trial with millennials. The campaign performed better than the pre-established benchmarks and exceeded key targets and goals. Specifically, the program achieved 23 million earned media impressions, 3x in-bar sales lift (meaning people spent three times the value of the beer when redeeming at the bar/POS), redemption at 100% of participating bars (thereby increasing on-premise spend and traffic during the program), and 7x industry average purchase conversion rate. Additionally the program received global media coverage from Conan O'Brien, Thrillist, Mashable, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. The success of the campaign has led ABI to significantly expand the program with a much larger initiative in 2015.