The Coors Light brand was struggling with millennials. Like the rest of the domestic light beer category, Coors Light is viewed as a low-quality offering by a generation who has increasingly come to expect more. To drive consideration, the brand created a series of native ads that were seamlessly integrated into Snapchat’s Live Story from the summit of Mt. Everest.
Objective and Context:
To meet aggressive volume goals, the brand needed to acquire new drinkers and build a relevant long-term brand by driving consideration and engagement. The primary KPIs for this effort were to improve consideration, brand health attributes, and view completion rate (VCR) as measured by Snapchat.
Target Audience:
The target audience for this was 21- to 34-year-old non-Coors-Light drinkers.
Creative Strategy:
For Coors Light, every climb deserves a refreshing finish. Whether you’re scaling Mt. Everest or just conquering the work week, Coors Light is the ultimate post-climb reward. In this case, the brand was able to capitalize on a real-time opportunity to deliver its brand message during the first-ever Snapchat story from the summit of Mt. Everest.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Coors Light’s Snapchat Mt. Everest execution recalled to the brand’s overall “Whatever Your Mountain, Climb On” campaign, creating a literal interpretation of its message with native ads on Snapchat.
Mobile Execution:
Snapchat’s platform is a natural and organic place to experience content, so any brand placements there need to be genuine and real, not forced. Instead of cutting vertical versions of TV commercials and interrupting the viewer’s experience, the brand came up with a series of ads tailored specifically to the Everest Live Story. This execution was customized to the Snapchat platform in video length, format, look, and feel. While most users are quick to tap through ads on this platform, these ads became almost unskippable, as they were integrated naturally into the content. The ads showed a group of climbers at different stages of making it up a snowy mountain. At first, it was hard to tell whether the ads were part of the Live Story or not — at least, until a thought bubble appeared over one person showing a Coors Light can in one of the ads. In another, two climbers sat in a tent that resembled a windblown one shown elsewhere in the Live Story, but in this tent the climbers opened a beer can, and then the tagline, “Every climb deserves a refreshing finish,” appeared.
Coors Light narrowed its consideration gap versus its main competitor by one point. It also increased its performance on its top two brand health attributes, with a three-point increase for “refreshing” and a one-point increase for “quality.” The campaign over delivered almost 1.5 million views against Coors Light’s original goal of 800,000 views. The VCR was incredibly strong at 44 percent, an unprecedented number for Snapchat.
