BACKGROUND

Budweiser is one of the few brands that has truly become part of pop culture, and this started when the brand's reputation grew stronger within the alternative music community, with magazines referring to Budweiser as "the alternative beer”. Being ingrained in alternative culture created an astonishing effect for Budweiser: artists who were taking their first steps, but later on became huge music icons, embraced the brand with no request or paychecks. By searching on Google, we discovered pictures of artists like Jagger, Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, Hendrix, and others, casually drinking a Bud in their time off. In fact, if you search for Budweiser + any music legend, you'll probably find a photo of both of them together. So, for the launch of the new tagline for Budweiser in the music platform, “The beer behind the music”, we wanted to find a way to expose this background to the public.

 

CREATIVE IDEA

Rumor has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures are treasures that represent the brand’s legacy on music. But, although they are part of Budweiser’s history, the brand cannot show them. Budweiser never asked or payed for these pictures, and that’s the beauty of it. We wanted to keep it this way. So, instead of promoting them, we decided to simply give people the directions to find each of these pictures by themselves, in their natural habitat: Google. All these pictures can be easily found with   Google search, as long as you know the exact directions. With a smart use of the search engine, we tracked all the combinations of words that could take people straight to each picture, and with this data we created an all type cross-media campaign, inviting people to search for specific combinations of words on the internet.

 

STRATEGY

We selected 10 pictures that contemplate different types of music and displayed the online ads according to the music taste and search history of each user, so we could start this hunt with more relevance. But we wanted to take over the conversations around the country, so we worked on a cross-media strategy, exploring OOH on the streets, and even invading bars, pubs and clubs with beer mats carrying our tag words. As every search happens online, and the combinations of words to be searched are very specific, we were able to track who was searching each one of them, so we could keep impacting the same user with different tag words, creating a pre-defined tour through the brand’s history along the hunt.

 

EXECUTION

We worked across different media to be able to contemplate 10 different combinations of tag words, offering the consumer a journey with complementary stories on social, media displays, OOH and even indoor media. We were able to organically direct people to each desired result/photography, with no need of any SEO investment. If a user searched for a specific combination, we could track it and impact it with the other combinations of tag words, thus keeping the hunt going.

 

RESULTS

The relevance of these photographs on the search engine increased by more than 7000%, reaching levels they had never reached before, even though they portray genuine moments of some of the most iconic artists of all time. We had more than 5 million searches of specific combinations of words we created. And, most importantly, this campaign opened the gates for Bud’s new positioning on music, giving people the necessary proof to sustain a very bold statement: Budweiser is “the beer behind the music”. And no other beer brand can claim the same.