The hiking electricity prices in parts of Africa has seen 3 out of 5 informal beer outlets turn their fridges off to avoid the higher running costs and rising electricity bills, making cold beer harder to find. A problem for a beer brand like Castle Lite who is all about Extra Cold Refreshment on one of the world's hottest continents, ultimately rendering all of our advertising meaningless and seeing a 35% decrease in Castle Lite sales in the warm fridge outlets.??

We needed to keep Castle Lite's Extra Cold Refreshment proposition relevant for beer drinkers to restore sales in the areas where cold beer had become harder to find, and discover a way to convince beer outlet owners to turn their fridges back on despite the higher electricity prices.

The informal beer market in Africa contributes to over 70% of Ab InBev Africa sales but is extremely price sensitive, seeing the smallest price margins not only impact consumer purchase but often promote unorthodox business decisions by outlets too.

This results in an unpredictable market for brands who are impacted by drastic decision-making that cannot be avoided through product price increases.

Our media-planning revolved around:

1. Real-time data

Using our devices we are able to pull each targeted outlets data set onto our platform which created leaderboards of the coldest fridges within each geo-fenced area and updated on our digital billboards telling consumers where they could find the coldest beer nearest to them – in real-time.

2. Hyper-Targeted Media

We created a digitally responsive campaign using one of Africa's highest reaching mediums. The digital billboards were located within the geo-fenced catchments of the outlets targeting consumers nearest to them.

We targeted 212 warm outlet fridges in key beer selling regions in Tanzania covering an area of 1500km, and fitted them with 3G technology which allowed us to track each fridges outlet name; street address and temperature.

We used this data to incentivise outlet owners to turn their fridges back on by giving the coldest fridges in a geo-fenced area free ad-space.

The data was pulled from our 3G devices on our Cold Tracker platform powered by Google Maps where cold fridge leaderboards were created.

The leaderboards were then shared on geo-targeted digital billboard sites within each respective district and supported by targeted social media posts and neighbourhood press ads.

The campaign acted as a live 'cold beer finder', not only short-handing consumers finding colder beer in real-time but keeping Castle Lite's brand proposition relevant by ensuring there was cold beer available on the other side of our advertising.

We brought a digitally interactive brand experience to a market with limited digital resources such as smart phones and easy internet accessibility through the use of data. By using our advertising to showcase our found data we enhanced consumers experience with Castle Lite, allowing them to find their beer cold when arriving at a given destination. We saw a 26% sales increase in the cold tracked outlets vs. the previous year within the same period – 19% more than our competitors in these outlets. By making 7 more cold Castle Lite's available per beer drinker in Tanzania in our targeted regions available vs. the previous year, we grew our market share from 6.0 to 8.8 vs. the previous year and ensured our Unlock Extra Cold Refreshment brand proposition remained tangible through a simple, media and data driven idea.