Viral Success of Absolut through Digital Marketing

Viral Success of Absolut through Digital Marketing

Description: 

This a short case study on how Absolut turned their wear out ads into a viral brand campaign through digital marketing

Background: 

Absolut Vodka was doing extremely well with the current brand campaign they were running. The campaign, which was about how creatives all over the world interpreted the shape of the bottle. It was running successfully for more than 10+ years. The problem with the campaign was "ad wear out", in some countries specifically the US,  the brand was experiencing wear out. Now, the challenge in front of them was to improve it's brand image in the wear out experiencing markets as well as maintain the current image in the other markets. Also, the impact of digital media on marketing campaigns needed to be assessed closely

Absolut identified their target audience as influencers- one who people admire, follow and believe in their opinion

Once the target audience was set, the next step was to create an action plan. The campaign called "In an Absolut world" was launched

Plan:  

The main idea behind "In an Absolut world" is, it encouraged consumers to share their version of an ideal, creative world among their peers. The campaign focused on the imagination power of the consumers, wherein the consumers created the content. As being said in the campaign, "Everything is possible In an Absolut world". 

For eg - One of the creative made by consumer shows a fat guy diving into a swimming pool and when he comes out he turns into a fully toned man

This example shows the dream and desire of a fat man to turn into a healthy man, however, this is practically not possible in the real world. but quite possible "In an Absolut world".  

PS- Thus explicitly saying whenever you are high, everything is possible

This campaign was laid out in 2 phases-

Phase 1 - The first phase focused on influencers, ranging from Kanye West and comedian Zach Galifianakis. They all were given the same brief - "What's your version of an Absolut world"? Every influencer made their own version and uploaded the same on Absolut's website or any other digital platform. Thus increasing the reach of the campaign

Phase 2 - The second phase of the campaign opened the floor to the creative vision of consumers, encouraging ordinary people to interact with the site and upload their own visions of an Absolut world, and to discuss, comment on and rate the content submitted by their peers.

The basic idea was to spark debate both online and offline within different interest areas that matched the target audience profile.

Here is a link for their digital campaign -  http://www.absolutads.com/?p=836

Outcome:

• With approximately 500 million editorial impressions during one year the campaign became one of the most discussed digital campaigns, and a huge success in the application of online media. Some of the campaign executions were videos broadcast on YouTube and other video-sharing sites (among others the videos produced by Zach Galifianakis and comedy duo Tim and Eric).
• With more than 2.5 million views this campaign also constituted a great viral success and created wider awareness for Absolut Vodka’s new brand campaign.

Things to be learned:

• Absolut emphasized on creating a buzz by roping in influencers who created videos about their version of the Absolut world and uploaded it on social media
• After this buzz was created on the Internet, the next step was to scale the campaign. Absolut scaled the campaign by turning the buzz into a viral campaign. The viral campaign was created by Absolut by giving the creative baton in the hands of the public. People made the campaign viral by sharing and debating, thus engaging with the brand and increasing brand visibility.
• Understanding consumer behavior: People love to express themselves creatively, Absolut understood this and they simply provided a platform to people. Peers commented, liked, shared, and even debated on the creative content made by others. This lead to high user engagement with the brand

Conclusion: 

Absolut’s ‘In an Absolut World’ campaign is a great example of crowdsourcing creative content in that way, and while the execution in this example smacks very much of a big-brand, high-budget campaign (hiring celebrities for the first phase; utilizing a design-intensive, search unfriendly flash micro-site to showcase content, etc), there’s no reason why a smaller business couldn’t harness the potential of user-generated content in a similar way using freely available social channels and web technologies to achieve great results on a fraction of the budget.