The Ask: Bud Light owns associations with professional football. It’s practically in their “Official Beer of the NFL” contract. How might we punch up to kick off the season?
When exclusive rights contracts get in the way of officially advertising in many markets to kick off the NFL season, you have to get pretty creative to make a splash.
So that’s what we did, creating one of the wildest 360 campaigns I can remember. We ambushed all the typical “illegal streaming” behaviors on game day to advertise a truly insane “Cantenna” product: a real beer with a real digital TV antenna for watching football.
We flooded streaming subreddits with posts disguised as links to games, bought key streaming SEM terms, and even created alternate Twitter accounts designed to look like illegal streaming bots…all leading to a site we also created to masquerade as an illegal streaming site. The whole campaign was bonkers, but it drove over +9,000% in brand favorably, and got us to the top of both AdAge and AdWeek for Week 1 of the NFL season. Not too bad for the “unofficial” beer of the NFL.