Rumor has it that a picture is worth a thousand words. These pictures are a treasure that represents the brand’s legacy on music. But, although they are part of Budweiser’s history, the brand doesn’t have the rights to show them, as they are truly casual and genuine moments eternalized by photography. Budweiser never asked or payed for that, 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: the Google Search platform. Each one of these pictures can be easily found via Google search, as long as one knows the exact directions. With a smart use of the search engine, we tracked all the combinations of words that can take people straight to each picture we wanted them to see, and with this data we created an all type cross-media campaign, inviting people to search for specific combinations of words on the internet. We used the organic search engine in our favor, with no attachments, so the internet could tell a story that we don’t have the rights to tell by ourselves.

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.

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 on 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.