As a value product, the brand looks to identify smart insights that can be leveraged in non-traditional communications channels to drive conversation. Without big budgets for mainstream paid media channels, Busch looks at popular cultural moments and brings its own perspective to create buzz.

Busch Beer is associated with blue-collar values—we are real, authentic and we celebrate the simple things in life. Our consumer is often surrounded by excess, complication, and sophistication. We like to just tell it like it is.

The brief was to identify something unique about how the Busch consumer talks about the product, given that it has been around for so many decades. We identified ‘Pumpkin Spice Latte’ season as a moment to create news for the brand when Americans get excited for the arrival of fall and special seasonal coffee drinks, the most popular of which is distributed by Starbucks and generates huge buzz.

Busch found that its social media community was consistently (hundreds of times a month) using the hashtag #BuschLatte to refer to the brand’s Busch Light product. It was an affectionate, organic reference to our beer, used either because drinkers were enjoying a beer early in the morning (when most were drinking coffee) OR because it parodied a sophistication not traditionally associated with Busch Light.

We renamed our product #BuschLatte during Pumpkin Spice Latte (PSL) Season—the time of year when EVERYONE was talking about their special morning coffee drink. We teased it before dropping limited edition cans and placing mobile OOH in front of Starbucks locations in New York, Chicago, LA and St Louis. The creative took a look/feel of a PSL ad… but for beer!

The cans weren’t available for sale, but we created a limited run and seeded them to editors and influencers around the country.

Busch wanted to capitalize against the real-time social listening within its community, changing its name to connect with a hyper-topical subcultural theme: pumpkin spice latte season.

Our key message was you don’t need to wait until pumpkin spice latte season to enjoy a great latte, when there is another one available all year round, #BuschLatte!

The primary audience was our drinkers: blue-collar consumers who created #BuschLatte organically with their friends and family. Our PR push was a message of celebration for the nickname they had given this product. Our secondary target was a more mass appeal to the millions of consumers that were talking about pumpkin spice season.

We focused on a collection of assets: a limited run of cans and used them in an image gallery across social media and editorial. We also commissioned mobile OOH in four key cities, with a creative execution that mirrored Starbucks.

Busch soft-launched the concept by first responding to the Elon Musk tweet months ahead of pumpkin spice season. With the positive response, we prepared to officially rename Busch Light for pumpkin spice season in August 2018.

The week leading up to August, we teased the can on social without revealing the label… and then dropped the name change across social channels on the day PSL lattes dropped in coffee shops across the country.

On launch day, we immediately pitched our story assets around #BuschLatte to national media - giving consumers the chance to purchase limited-edition #BuschLatte merchandise. While the cans weren’t on-sale, the community gravitated to the real-time nature of the story and topical response to PSL season. We dropped cans on the desks of key influencers and editors, while also pulling up our OOH mobile billboards to Starbucks locations in St Louis, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

The strategic media outreach generated 46 editorial impressions and 24 social posts from media, resulting in more than 210M media impressions across editorial and nearly 41M social media impressions.

Busch Lattes were featured all over the media landscape, across consumer lifestyle, food and news verticals with key placements running in Thrillist, Eater, Food & Wine, Business Insider, and Chron.com. 100% of press coverage and social chatter was positive in tone and praised the brand for a clever marketing tactic that ably made noise during a saturated pop culture moment.