Poker beer has been the brand that that stands for friendship since 1929, but friendships have evolved; people no longer tend to gather in front of a TV, they’re in WhatsApp groups with their friends. And we wanted to be in that space. Which poses a problem: never, under any circumstance, has WhatsApp allowed advertisement, in the words of March Zuckerberg, “its fully encrypted”. So, hand in hand with AbInBev we had only one goal for our future communications: Find a way of hacking WhatsApp, and become direct friends with our consumers in this Social Network.

We did it! We found a way of getting into friends’ conversations in WhatsApp and becoming a friend everyone wants to have. People would find one of hundreds of cellphone numbers under the bottle caps, voluntarily added them to their friend’s groups in WhatsApp, and interacted directly with us.

Throughout the world, friends are now talking through WhatsApp, and as the brand that stands for friendship, we needed to do something to be in those conversations. Therefore, we came up with a mechanism whereby consumers would voluntarily add our numbers to their own Whatsapps. Making us their direct Friends. Bot Friends with “real friends’ personalities”.

We did all this in just a ONE MONTH CAMPAIGN. We created a platform that hacked WhatsApp so efficiently that even today, they haven't discovered it or banned any of our bots. Then, we put hundreds of cellphones lines under 160 million beer bottle caps, and we launched a campaign through WhatsApp that communicates to consumers the type of friends they could find; if they added the cellphone numbers to their Whatsapp, we interacted directly with them. Friends like the comedian, or even Chuck Norris. This took the campaign to the next level; Chuck Norris was one of the hundreds of friends under the caps. And the lucky consumers who found his contact, got to interact directly with him.

- In only 1 month

- 7 Billion media impressions and still counting.

- 330.000% rise in social traffic

- We passed from 100 monthly interactions to 32.000.000 (million) interactions in a month.

- 12,5 % Sales increase, that’s over 200 Million beers sold in 1 month

- None of our bots have been detected

- And we are the first brand in the whole world that transformed WhatsApp into a media with a measurable ROI.