Coors is all about providing moments to kick back and refresh the spirit. So when our largest competitor locked us out of advertising during the biggest beer moment of the year (the Super Bowl) we skipped TV all together. And went direct to a place no brand had gone before – letting people dream our ad.

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 20 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: your dreams.

While our competitor was running traditional commercials on the game, we gave beer drinkers a true moment of refreshment from a brand that’s all about refreshing the spirit. With a fully immersive experience scientifically designed to plant a Coors dream in an individual’s subconscious.

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.

Then tapped into one of the biggest social influencers in the world, Zayn Malik to try it himself the night before the game, and showing off every touch point of the experience.

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 innovation hungry target audience of 21–27-year-olds a new ad experience - one that left them waking up feeling refreshed.

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

It started with dream incubation techniques designed to prepare your mind to dream a Coors commercial. 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.

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

On Super Bowl Sunday, we picked the best dreams people posted and had famous Instagram artists create personalized art for our dreamers.

The campaign garnered 1,369,984,220 earned impressions. In social, we saw a 3000% increase in social engagement, and a 25% increase in Instagram followers.

The total experience 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.