The Campaign
For twelve years, BACARDÍ have been a sponsor of Electric Picnic, Ireland’s largest annual music and arts festivals. Over that time, the CASA BACARDÍ stage has truly become one of the mainstays of the festival. In 2016 CASA BACARDÍ was a reconstruction of the original Bacardí family home. The Latin inspired area delivered great cocktails and a line-up of 18 International and local DJ’s across the weekend. Once again, it truly brought the Bacardí brand to life at the biggest festival of the year. Across the summer we leveraged the heritage of Bacardí at EP, and the goodwill surrounding the CASA BACARDÍ brand, to produce a highly focussed social media campaign.
The Activation
Facebook and Twitter were our platforms of choice, engaging fans directly with a series of targeted competitions that rolled out over the summer, helping to build excitement and create buzz around CASA BACARDÍ in the months leading up the big event. This included an innovative game of Facebook Tag, the first competition of its sort, which in itself attracted significant numbers of new fans.
The Inside Tracks
Crucially, we produced a series of videos featuring BACARDÍ ambassadors with long established links to CASA BACARDÍ and Electric Picnic. These videos were designed specifically for consuming and sharing on mobile. For our opening piece we tracked down Cork DJ Stevie G, who opened BACARDÍ’s very first Electric Picnic stage in 2005,and was playing again at CASA BACARDÍ 2016. He was the perfect link – you might even say he personified the campaign.
The Casa Caddy
To bring our digital campaign alive in the real world, we developed a uniquely BACARDÍ experience that we could take on the road. The CASA CADDY was a classic, Cuban-style Cadillac, which we parked in Dublin’s city centre. Passers-by were invited to jump in and share their Electric Picnic experiences. And, thanks to the appeal of the auto-mobile’s plush interior, lots did.
The Results
By combining these strands of creative, we were able to tell the CASA BACARDÍ story from a range of different perspectives – the DJs on the decks, the mixologist behind the bar, the planner behind the scenes and, most importantly perhaps, the festival goer in the crowd. The Bacardí brand was the big winner at this year’s Electric Picnic festival, according to a report by PSG Sponsorship. 69% of the 55,000 festival-goers said Bacardí made the biggest impression on them over the three days of EP. The best result of all sponsors at the festival. And 49% mentioned Bacardí when asked unprompted to name an EP sponsor. By every metric available, the campaign was remarkably successful, delivering big on a relatively small budget.