Coors Light has always been known as humorous and a bit cheeky. April Fools day was an opportunity they didn't want to miss out on this year. Our goals we three-fold.
1) Experiment with Periscope, which had just been launched a few days prior.
2) Generate some buzz and engagement on our social properties.
3) Get on some best-of list of pranks, that tend to follow April Fools.
After Periscope launched on the Friday prior, we spent the weekend fully immersed and came out of it with some fresh insights. One particular trend that emerged was the "Show me what's in your fridge" meme. As it so happens, we're experts in cold things that come from fridges, so we decided to show them what was in ours.
The grand reveal was a new product innovation called Coors Light Sacks. Basically, beer in 1.33L bags (similar to how milk is sold in parts of Canada). We chose to promote the Tweet generated by the app to increase our viewership seeing as this was the first time we'd Periscoped. As viewers signed in they saw a timer counting down. The tension was palpable. When the clock hit zero, the fridge door opened to reveal our Sacks.
Following the initial spike in attention around our live-stream stunt, we published studio quality product shots onto Facebook and Twitter. The likes rolled in. And so did the trolls. We were ready, armed with a team of funny and sarcastic community managers to prop up the likes and turn the hate into love.
We measured sentiment analysis, social media engagement and media exposure to give us a tally of earned impressions. We made it to several 'best of' lists, including Buzz Feed and Canada's biggest business newspaper, The Globe and Mail.
Following our spike in traffic that day, we acquired thousands of new followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Periscope. We've also seen an increase in overall comment-to-follower ratio compared to before. Some of our fans see Coors Light more as a friend they can better relate now.
