Rather than dipping a toe into the world of participation & content, Foster’s went all-in… by handing over the reigns of the their brand to 4 strangers !

Partnering with C4, we began with a nationwide recruitment campaign. Foster’s scoured the nation to find the people who embodied our ‘can-do’ attitude. Using a phone-box and street casting, we asked the public one simple question: do you fancy a pint in Oz?

After a rigorous casting process we found 4 plucky Brits: Jamie, Jon, Steve and Priscilla. Each a complete stranger, but all ready to give life a good go.

We stuck them in a van, and then set them off on a 17k mile, awe-inspiring journey from London to Melbourne. And filmed it all.

At every checkpoint, the tourists were faced with unique local ‘challenges’ which not only created great content, but also demonstrated the personification of the Foster’s brand.

To inspire our audience, our ambition was to create a completely authentic story that they could truly participate in. We scoured the UK, actively recruiting real people off the street to take part in the tour, and then we targeted the audience across multiple social channels to encourage fan participation, and ultimately drive traffic to the home of the full series as it unfolded on All4.

As the activation played out over 20 weeks, we constantly fed the fans content they could react to, and we empowered them to participate: e.g. naming the van, choosing a tour mascot, and we even gave them the opportunity to interact directly with the tourists.

Finally, we gave the 4 tourists final editorial control. They shot and edited the promo for the whole series and aired it on channel 4 – all without the client or agency seeing or approving it.

Engagement: ‘Helluva Tour’ was not just watched, but actively sought out and was the highest rating branded content on All4 for our target audience. And this wasn’t due to one killer piece of content. Across the series the average completion rate was over 87% per episode and combined, the body of work received 13.5 million views.

Attribution: Prompted recall of the idents was 6% higher than the C4 average, driving awareness of the Brand 30% higher than non-viewers.

Brand-building:

The Helluva Tour also cemented Foster's new strategic position whilst lifting all key brand metrics:

a brand to be seen with +7

a brand I can trust +8

a brand that shares my interests +4

a great brand for me +3

and even

a brand with an established heritage +4.

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Most importantly however, of those exposed to the activation, 87% were more likely to make Foster's their first choice lager.