Situation

In 2020, thousands of restaurants and bars were forced to close their doors due to the pandemic. As many others, Maverick –one of the top cocktail bars in Mexico– pivoted their business model to delivery and pickup in order to stay alive and support their staff during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Brief

Create "something" that could compliment the launch of Maverick's new to-go cocktail line, in order to take the bar's unique essence to an at-home experience, while preventing their products from becoming a commodity while many other bars were launching their own delivery services.

Objectives

· Increasing to-go cocktail sales to reach the bar's break even point during closures.

· Creating a platform that could support the whole hospitality industry as well, while increasing Maverick's brand value and keeping its brand ecosystem always present.

· Using a minimum budget for production.

I Miss My Bar is a website that recreates the sonic atmosphere of Maverick, from the sound of the bartender making cocktails, to the sound of people inside the bar in a busy night, and exterior street sounds, which users can customize to create their own perfect soundscape– while enjoying a cocktail safely at home.

Also, Maverick integrated a playlist with music curated by different bars around the world updated weekly, linked to their own websites in order to support each bar participating in this initiative.

While the website was created with the immediate purpose of reaching the local audience who kept the bar full each night before the pandemic, we wanted to create a tool that could become a symbol for the whole hospitality industry as well, by highlighting the importance that bars have in the social tissue of every city around the world and remembering people how much they missed the experience of sharing with others at their own local bar.

With that in mind, the assets used at the site as graphics, sounds and language were carefully crafted to represent a universal experience at a bar that anyone at a global audience could relate to, while keeping some distinctive elements of Maverick’s experience present that only locals could recognize, as the illustration of Maverick’s actual bar used at the site, or the voice of an actual street vendor that's always around.

We were briefed in mid-June 2020. The site was produced and aired in only two weeks, in critical moment for Maverick and its staff who were suffering the economic consequences of lock-downs at its peak, with to-go cocktail sales representing only 20% of the income needed to operate.

For the local audience, the site was promoted using organic content in Maverick’s social media and by sending free cocktail kits to the bar's most loyal customers, along with printed postcards recommending the use of the site to complement their drinking experience. This created an important amount of word-of-mouth for the site in Maverick’s community almost instantly.

For the global audience, we kept lending the site’s playlist weekly to bars and stakeholders in the hospitality industry throughout the world, who helped promote the use of the site through their own platforms in cities like London, Lisbon, and others in Mexico.

In July 2020, to-go sales went up by 1200%, increasing Maverick's total income above pre-pandemic levels, expanding its market and creating a new source of revenue that has permitted the bar to generate profits steadily since then.

Then the site went viral at a global scale:

· 30+ million organic impressions in social media.

· 25+ million organic impressions from media features including articles from The New York Times, CNN and Bloomberg News along with hundreds of others, virtually in every continent.

· Over 7 million unique visitors at imissmybar.com in 8 months.

Maverick’s clients and people around the world have used this platform as new way of experiencing the brand’s core values and as a form of therapy while staying safely at home, bringing Maverick to the global spotlight by becoming a symbol of hope for its whole industry.