Background:

The informal beer market in Africa contributes to nearly 70% of AB InBev Africa sales but is extremely price sensitive, seeing the smallest price margin increases not only impact consumer purchase but often promote unorthodox business decisions by informal beer outlets too.

This results in an unpredictable market for brands who are often impacted by drastic owner decision-making, often due to volatile socio-economic factors that cannot be avoided through the typical product price increase or promotion.

Challenge:

The hiking electricity prices in parts of Africa has seen 3 out of 5 informal beer outlets turn their fridges off to avoid the higher running costs and rising electricity bills, making cold beer harder to find. A problem for a beer brand like Castle Lite who has invested in an Extra Cold Refreshment proposition for over a decade on one of the world's hottest continents. This ultimately rendered all of our advertising meaningless and saw a 35% decrease in Castle Lite sales and a decrease in market share from 7.1 to 6.0.

We needed to keep Castle Lite's Extra Cold Refreshment proposition relevant for beer drinkers and restore brand meaning and sales in the areas where cold beer had become harder to find, and discover a way to change beer outlet owners behaviour to get them to turn their fridges back on despite the higher electricity prices.

Solution:

We targeted over 400 warm fridge outlets to turn their fridges back on with Cold Tracker. The World's first temperature-based media trading platform. An ongoing initiative that allows us to trade cold fridge space in exchange for free ad space for outlets. By fitting 3G devices into outlet fridges we track their exact location and temperature – 
in-real-time.

A Cold Tracker tracks the coldest fridges in an area and rewards the outlets with free geo-located advertising space. By pulling the data from our cold tracked outlets onto digital outdoor sites, targeted social media and weekly local neighbourhood press we showcased the coldest fridges (and Castle Lite) in an geo-fenced area whilst telling people exactly where to find it too.

Execution:

We targeted over 400 warm outlet fridges in key beer selling regions in Tanzania covering an area of 1500km, and fitted them with 3G technology which allowed us to track each fridges outlet name; street address and temperature all in real-time.

We used this data to incentivise outlet owners to turn their fridges back on by giving the coldest fridges in a geo-fenced area free ad-space.

The data was pulled from our 3G devices on our Cold Tracker platform powered by Google Maps where cold fridge leaderboards were created.

The leaderboards were shared on geo-targeted digital billboard sites within each district and supported by targeted social media posts and neighbourhood press.

The campaign acted as a live 'cold beer finder', not only short-handing consumers finding colder beer in real-time but keeping Castle Lite's brand proposition relevant by ensuring there was cold beer available on the other side of our advertising.