Our Work
Bud Light Virtual Gifts
Background
Bud Light, one of the most recognizable brands in the world, maintains a consistent advertising presence across disparate media outlets. The beverage giant was an early adopter of social media advertising, garnering hundreds of thousands of social brand advocates with the release of Check Your Dudeness on Facebook in the spring of 2008.
Bud Light was so thrilled with the success of their first social campaign that they returned to Buddy Media when the time came to make another splash in the social world. The brand’s goal was to drive widespread adoption of an application that would spread Bud Light digital assets across a wide swath of Facebook users. Buddy Media promised a simple social utility that would leverage the power of Facebook’s new Public Profiles to reach a large number of brand advocates with Bud Lights imagery and messaging.
Objectives
- Build a viral Facebook app-vertisement to promote the Bud Light brand to Facebook users of legal drinking age
- Revolutionize virtual gifting technology by leveraging the power of the Facebook Public Profile
- Drive viral audience growth through social gestures and Facebook Newsfeed messaging Facebook
Solution
The Bud Light Virtual Gifts campaign leveraged the synergistic and complementary power of the Buddy Media team. First, our creative geniuses developed a branded interface to wrap around official sponsored Bud Light gifts. With art direction and creative design complete, the Buddy Media development team optimized the application to leverage all social integration points so that when users send a Bud Light gift, all of their friends hear about it through Newsfeed and Profile posts – a catalyst to viral and social growth.
Our project managers developed a unique strategy behind the launch of Bud Light Gifts that provided the application with a sustainable, loyal user base—ensuring return usage and engagement. Specifically, the app-vertisement was created with a flexible interface that allows gifts to be changed to reflect the season or to promote a special event. The final piece of the puzzle was leveraging the new capabilities of the Facebook Public Profile through the creation of Bud Light Central.
The new ‘Fan Page’ gave the application permanent real estate in a place where Bud Light brand advocates could send gifts, watch videos, or discuss their favorite beer – with all social gestures promoted through the Facebook Newsfeed. This strategy created a virtual ‘blitz’ of comprehensive messaging that continues to spread across the social graph.
