Our Work
Bud Light Party Cruise
Background
In the spring of 2008, Bud Light tasked Buddy Media with developing an interactive, social media application to support its annual Party Cruise promotion (an offline contest that rewards winners with an all-expense paid cruise). Bud Light wanted to create a virtual community for contest winners that could serve as an official “pre-party” destination to locate, interact and engage with fellow cruisers. The app needed to be a place where winners could share photos and stories before and while on board the cruise ship. In addition, the application needed to have a long shelf life so that users could maintain contact with their new friends via a centralized Bud Light VIP community. The project presented a challenge for Buddy Media’s development team, as the application needed to be accessible solely to contest winners over the legal US drinking age.
Objectives
- Build an engaging Facebook social app-vertisement that would serve as a virtual meeting place for winners of the Bud Light Party Cruise promotion
- Develop the technology to restrict access to the application by minors and the Facebook community at large
- Leverage pre-existing mapping technology to allow contest winners to view the geographic location of other users
Solution
Buddy Media worked with Bud Light to create a unique user interface that matched the distinctive aesthetic of the brand’s wide-reaching marketing campaign. With concept and creative in hand, the Buddy Media tech team created an entry page that would be visible to all Facebook users, but accessible only to winners with a secret promo code supplied by Anheuser Busch.
However, before the application could launch, Buddy Media needed to create an age-gating solution to prevent minors from accessing the application. Facebook has strict rules regarding content associated with alcohol, so Buddy Media developed a portal page that required users to input their dates of birth before continuing to the application. The entered date was then cross-referenced to the user’s profile information in order to confirm the date of birth. Once inside the main user interface, winners could find each other by searching the “Cruiser Locator,” an innovative feature that integrated Yahoo! Maps with each user’s Facebook profile location.
