Cannes Lions
AFRICA, Sao Paulo / AB INBEV / 2019
Awards:
Overview
Entries
Credits
Background
Every beer company can sponsor sports championships.
But only Budweiser has a true relationship with great legends of sports. Big stars like Michael Jordan, David Beckham, Antoine Griezmann have chosen Budweiser, regardless of sponsorship deals.
Idea
Make our audience organically search for tags on Google that resulted in pictures where Bud was the beer of choice of many sports legends. And in order to make that more appealing, we’ve decided to hack Google Maps, a frequently used tool by many sports fans.
Strategy
Every beer company can sponsor sports championships.
But only Budweiser has a true relationship with great legends of sports. Big stars like Michael Jordan, David Beckham, Antoine Griezmann have chosen Budweiser, regardless of sponsorship deals.
Execution
We’ve studied the sports fans journey and found the best places and opportunities to reach them before, during and after important matches. Then, we placed posters, billboards and OOH close to bars, stadiums, and even the playfield, inviting people to google the tag words and discover that legends of sports choose Bud.
We’ve also found that before an important game there is an average 200% increase in search volume for the stadium of the match. Based on that we came up with a new way of doing influence marketing, by hiring a new kind of influencer: Google’s Local Guides. With their help we organically ranked our photos on the top of the list.
Outcome
We had reached 7.5MM SEARCHES. A number they had never reached before, even though they portray genuine moments of great athletes of our time. We had more than 11,000% increase in the photographs relevance on the search engine.
This was only possible thanks to an extremely efficient campaign: even with low investment, we were able to deliver the message at the right time and for the right people.
And, most importantly, this campaign opened the gates for Bud’s positioning on sports, giving people the necessary proof to sustain a very bold statement: Budweiser is “the beer behind sports”. And no other beer brand can claim the same. And all of that with a total of zero lawsuits.
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