The Super Bowl is as much about the commercials as it is about football. But they’re becoming tired and expected with the same “winning” formula being used every year – huge productions, big name celebrities, and talking animals and babies. So, to do something no brand has ever done, we let people’s subconscious write their own Super Bowl commercial for Coors Light, by running an ad in an entirely new medium – your dreams.

The Super Bowl isn’t just one of the biggest beer moments of the year, it’s the biggest media moment. Due to their massive spend, Bud Light has big game exclusivity, meaning no other beer brand can advertise on the game. So how does Coors Light get noticed while being outspent 10 to 1, and legally not being able to advertise on the game itself? We run our commercial in the one place they can’t stop us.

Even though the Super Bowl is one of the biggest media opportunities of the year, the attempts by advertisers to make the best Super Bowl ad is fairly expected.

So rather than creating a beer commercial made for millions, we launched an immersive web experience scientifically designed to plant a Coors dream in an individual’s subconscious. No two dreams, or experiences, were the same.

Before we released it to the masses, we ran a legitimate sleep study to make sure it worked, then released a documentary on social inviting anyone to dream our Super Bowl ad.

During the biggest beer drinking event of the year, dreamers were able to get a free pack of Coors Seltzer with any pack of Coors Light, giving beer drinkers a true moment of refreshment from a brand that’s all about refreshing the spirit.

Our main competitor, Bud Light, had exclusive rights to advertising for the big game. The TV medium wasn’t an option for Coors. So, we started with what Coors Light and Coors Seltzer stand for – refreshment, and asked ourselves: how can we break through the hype of the TV ads in a way that completely refreshes people? With the phenomenon of “pandemic dreams” and Google searches for “dreams” and “sleep” being higher than ever, we saw it as an opportunity to give our target audience of 21–27-year-olds a new dream experience - one that left them waking up feeling refreshed.

We partnered with a Harvard psychologist and dream expert to create a fully immersive experience designed to plant a Coors Super Bowl ad in your dream.

It started by guiding you through dream incubation techniques to prepare your mind. Then led to first of-its-kind visual stimulus scientifically designed to implant refreshing Coors imagery, like mountains and rivers, into your subconscious before bed. An accompanying 8-hour soundscape reinforced the imagery as you slept, and asked you to share your dream on social in the morning.

To prove it worked, we ran a legitimate dream study testing it on 25 subhjects. Then released a documentary on social inviting people to try it. Global superstar, Zayn Malik, tried it live, and let people watch him sleep (and dream) for 8 hours.

On Super Bowl Sunday, we chose the craziest dreams people posted and had Instagram artists create personalized art for our Coors dreamers.

The campaign led to an 8% increase in sales for Coors, outperforming Bud Light sales growth by 5x, even though they spent 10x more than us on media. That positive gain resulted in the highest category share in Coors’ brand history.

Beyond sales, the brand’s efforts garnered 1,369,984,220 earned impressions. In social, we saw a 3000% increase in social engagement, and a 25% increase in Instagram followers.