Turning Budweiser Around in 6 Months
2014 / Anomaly
In 2014 I was one of two Creative Directors of Budweiser. Bud’s TV spend was 10-15x their social spend. The highest priority was developing a new brand platform, but the many fiefdoms of Bud couldn’t agree on one. And no one—not Bud, not Anomaly, not any of the partner agencies—was paying attention to social.
So while the C-Suite had their power struggles, we made multiple, small-scale holistic changes across social. Basically, we used social to test run our brand platform. At the time, this was a new idea, and one that would ultimately affect every aspect of the brand.
Bud’s First Live Social Campaign
We introduced Bud to their first 24-hr newsroom-style social campaign during the 2014 World Cup. Twitter takeovers, live experiential coverage, and as much product and Rihanna posts as we could sling.
Bud’s First Social Content Collab
We stumbled across a PR partnership with Bud and Alife that was originally intended for PR-release only. At the time, that was normal. But we pushed to add it social and guess what? It got engagement. Suddenly the audiences Bud was struggling to encounter were following us.
For a brand that only did big TV, this was the beginnings of a revolution.
Bud’s First Social Campaign
to Generate Positive ROI
We had never been able to affect design at the brand-level, but on social, we could. When the Qualuminum pack designs hit, we saw an opportunity to modernize and elevate Bud’s brand look.
The Qualuminum social campaign was the first Bud social campaign to ever generate positive ROI, resulting in 2% product sales lift and 5% Budweiser brand sales lift for all impressions. People actually bought beer after seeing the ads. The Qualuminum campaign caused 2 major distributors sell out of Budweiser for the first time in 25 years. It was one of the smallest pieces of the social business and it became the turning point for the next 10 years of Budweiser.
The Aftermath
I moved on to other brands within Anomaly shortly after the launch of Qualuminum. But the campaign’s success was emulated across the brand in the months that followed, even by partners we had no exposure to at all. It became the brand campaign we had been selling all along.
Qualuminum’s campaign look…
…Bud’s pack design 6 months later.
Qualuminum’s tone of voice…
…Bud’s Super Bowl ad 8 months later.
Fun fact: “Brewed the Hard Way” was cut almost entirely out of footage I shot for Bud during my first tour at Anomaly for the Track Your Bud app, an app that traced every Budweiser’s journey from farm to table. Seriously—every Bud in America is locally brewed. You can watch the case study here.
When I got on Bud, creatives considered it a punishment to work on the brand. It was a constant guessing game with no right answers. When I left 6 months later, the strategy, look, and tone of voice was figured out. The brand had turned a profit for the first time in 25 years. The “Brewed the Hard Way” platform lasted longer than Anomaly did, continuing for several years after Budweiser moved away from the AOR model.
If you liked this work,
you might also like the
people who worked on it.
Luke Behrends, Creative Direction
Roger Bova, Design Direction (Qualuminum)
Heather Brodie, Concept and Copywriting (World Cup and Qualuminum)
Isaac Weeber, Concept and Design
Andy Craig, Strategy
Chris Lubin, Strategy
Daryl Homer, Account Management, plus he did it for the culture
Mike Byrne, Sent threatening emails to C-level clients for us, didn’t get in the way
And you might like
these projects:
Samsung /make
Almost exactly the same situation and results. Short time, best-ever ROI, and lasting impact on the brand’s creative.
Panera
Another super-effective campaign that I did directly after Bud with mostly the same people.
Budweiser “Hype”
The kind of Creative Direction people don’t really talk about—bringing dead creative back to life. I didn’t make this spot, but I brought it back months after it died and got it to air during the World Cup.