Budweiser is one of the few brands that has truly become part of pop culture, and all this started in the 1960’s, when the brand's reputation grew stronger within the alternative music community, with magazines referring to Budweiser as "the alternative beer”. Being ingrained in alternative culture created an astonishing effect for Budweiser: artists who were taking their first steps, but later on became huge music icons, embraced the brand with no request or paychecks. By searching on Google, we discovered pictures of artists like Jagger, Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, Hendrix, and others, casually drinking a Bud in their time off. In fact, if you search for Budweiser + any music legend, you'll probably find a photo of both of them together. So, for the launch of the new tagline for Budweiser in the music platform in Brazil, “The beer behind the music”, we wanted to find a way to expose this background to the public.

Our campaign “Tagwords” found a creative solution to leverage an everyday consumer behavior (Google search) to connect the Budweiser brand to dozens of millions of dollars worth of assets – the photos of legends having a Bud throughout music history. Budweiser never asked or payed for these photos, and that’s the beauty of it. We wanted to keep it this way. So, instead of promoting them, we decided to simply give people the directions to find each of these pictures by themselves, in their natural habitat: Google.

Our creative way of hacking the Google engine and the copyright system was a success. The campaign was effective in generating the desired consumer behavior, by growing branded searches up to 297% (1) with zero paid search support.

Creativity is also an attitude, one that pays off. Almost half of the 51 million (2) people reached by the campaign didn’t have to be near one of our OOH units, or ever had to click on a post. The buzz generated by the campaign did the job for us. Many times, publishers would tell the full story for us by putting Budweiser and those very music legends side by side on their content.

Ultimately, the campaign helped Budweiser accomplish its commercial objective: to close the market share the gap Vs. its main competitor in Brazil, Heineken, even stealing the category leadership during the quarter when the campaign was live Vs. the same period of 2017 (3).

(1) Source: Google Analytics. Results provided by Google only as growth percentage. See the attached document: ABInbev Market and Media Data

(2) Source: Blinks Analytics Report. Data reported from November 1st to December 20th 2018.

(3) Source: NIELSEN Market Data 17-18. See the attached document: ABInbev Market and Media Data