Our task was to communicate the BACARDÍ brand philosophy (“True Passion Can’t Be Tamed”). The conventional entertainment strategy to achieve this would be to sponsor, or feature within, content created by existing broadcasters (TV stations etc).

But our objective was to reach consumers across multiple markets, and a paid-for partnership approach would be super expensive when rolled out globally.

Instead we chose to create our own entertainment content. For alcohol brands, this most commonly takes the form of in-bar ‘party-style’ experiences. But this takes a long time and lots of effort to reach a substantial audience size and it is difficult to communicate deep messaging about the brand.

So we created a single live experience, which was filmed for global audiences to see and share. The challenge with this brand entertainment strategy is that it lives or dies by how shareable consumers consider the content to be. For every video on YouTube that’s gone ‘viral’, there are a million others with a mere handful of views.

The final consideration is that any branded entertainment from alcohol brands must adhere to global best practice for responsible alcohol advertising.

The content had an intriguing mission: an experiment to see if BACARDÍ could turn the movement of bats into music. We activated around the technology and music festival, SxSW, tapping into a captive audience.

We shared the live event via BACARDÍ’s social channels and invited along select influencers and editors. This provided baked-in mass exposure (and credibility), as they communicated the activity to their own network. The story gained widespread coverage, including an in-depth feature in Fast Company.

The audio is now being remixed by DJ Craig Richards and will be distributed by Fabric London’s social channels and ambassadors.

The buzz generated from the activity has, so far, generated 4 million impressions on Twitter and had 165K video views. Influential lifestyle blogs and news sites, such as Fast Company, The Verge, Stupid Dope & High Snobiety covered the project positively, giving BACARDÍ some serious kudos.

Engagement with the content on BACARDÍ social channels was 60% higher than average for these channels, with organic reach seeing a three-fold increase on Facebook.

Comparing the three weeks around the live event with the three weeks prior to the activity, online conversation around BACARDÍ AND ‘bats’ increased by over 200%, showing that a stronger association is being formed. As the brand icon, this demonstrates a shift where BACARDÍ represents more than just a liquid.

The activity is genuinely helping BACARDÍ to gain positive sentiment among consumers who wouldn’t usually consider the brand as demonstrated in comments on the video: “This is beyond amazing, I may have to give BACARDÍ another chance just for making this happen” and “This is cool!” [posted by a Music Editor].

The remix by leading producer Craig Richards is still to follow.