The BWS 21st birthday celebration campaign, Pay for Hooray, invited customers to celebrate 21 years of stellar service nationwide.
In June this year, BWS partnered with creative agency M&C Saatchi and media agency Carat for an integrated campaign that paid customers anywhere from $10 to $5000 for giving BWS a birthday shoutout on www.bwsbirthday.com.au.
BWS invited Australian celebrities Abbie Chatfield and Khanh Ong to encourage Australians to participate in the antics.
The shout out tasks ranged from a simple birthday message, a song or dance dedication, to getting your mates involved and pulling off a 21 person choir.
Dentsu media agency Carat led strategy, planning and buying for the campaign. Channels include a screen strategy designed to reach younger Aussies at scale across the month-long campaign and include partners such as Vevo, Twitch, YouTube and BVOD and high reaching OOH placements.
'Pay for Hooray' was the first time the refreshed BWS brand identity hit the market.
BWS head of marketing Anna Webster provided insight into the marketing strategy behind the campaign.
Webster: "We know that most people don't care about a bottleshop’s birthday, but at BWS we are all about celebrating with our customers and team members, which is why we want to have a bit of fun with ours.
“For our birthday this year, we are asking our customers to complete a number of birthday tasks and we will reward them with cash so they can celebrate and have their own fun."
Creative director of M&C Saatchi, Brendan Donnelly recognises that the public don’t care about a brand's birthday, especially one they might not share childhood nostalgic memories with, but they sure do care about a party, and even better, one they get paid to attend.
Donnelly: “BWS was turning 21 and like most brands they wanted to celebrate this milestone age. The brief was to run a prize promotion with $400,000 worth of $21k prizes given away over the month of their birthday. We tapped into the insight that people don't really care about brands birthdays, especially a brand like BWS. For brands like Mcdonald's you might have some nostalgic childhood memories but that's not the case for BWS, at least we hope not. “
Donnelly explains the notion of celebration and over the top escapades to be the crux of the campaign.
He said: “Our idea was to take that prize pool and pay people to celebrate with us, simple as that, make us a cake we'll pay you, sing us happy birthday, we'll pay you. But how far would people go? It turns out pretty far, we had giant happy birthday messages photographed by drones, people hiding inside life-size cakes, choirs, original songs, and dances.
“The Pay-For-Hooray campaign delivered 75,000 original birthday responses, three times the expectation. So it turns out money can buy love."
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