Case Study
A multi-city campaign fusing basketball culture and live music with a diggy/fizzy content and experiential engine that gave every activation a life well beyond an event.
Coors Light had deep roots in the Rockies, but was losing cultural relevance with the 21–35 city dweller. They had all the standard tools of [Big Beer Brand X]...and none of it was breaking through. The target audience had developed a finely tuned filter for forced brand content and partnerships.
The brief was straightforward but presented an interesting set of requirements: earn Coors Light's place in culture with urban millennials by celebrating the mountains they've overcome in the places where their climb started: at home. Find a way to drive real sales lift in activation markets while creating content that fans would actually share. And do it across multiple cities without it feeling like a rollout.
The first insight was that these consumers are diverse and have interests and curiosity that's fed by living in the city. Earning badge and talk value among this audience is especially tough because they are bombarded with branded advertising and have a finely tuned radar for BS.
Working with the creative agency, we developed a phased approach: an overarching equity campaign and basketball and live music takedowns to make a deeper connection with this audience. Knowing these weren't just adjacent interests for this audience — they were the same conversation - these programs and elements had to be Diggy/Fizzy and meet potential consumers where they are both irl and online. That's something Bud Light could never do.
I contributed to the equity campaign but really sunk my teeth into Full Court reFRESH and Soundtrack reFRESH multi-city platforms: a series of concerts and basketball court refurbishments that brought the reFRESH campaign to life in a way a pure digital campaign could never touch.
Full Court combined social and experiential, where Coors Light promised to increase its donations for basketball court refurbishing if consumers used the hashtag #FullCourtreFRESH. We partnered with Kenny Smith of Inside the NBA, completing a media tour and integration into Inside to spread the word. Kenny also showed up in-market, speaking on the importance of pickup basketball to his development as a player and person. The Sacramento Kings welcomed Kenny back to town as the franchise who drafted him, promoting the program as a way to connect basketball, the Kings and fans in Sacramento.
As the program became more successful, new partners jumped onboard, including many of Coors Light's other NBA partners, who were happy to activate programming to boost the sponsorship. Working with the partner in this way improved partner engagement and retention.
"The events were content factories. The content strategy brought this to life in a way that allowed consumers to participate, and rewarded the most loyal."
Soundtrack was focused on hip-hop, and each participating market was matched with a DJ who represented the sound. DJ Infamous in Atlanta. DJ E-Feezy in Miami. 8 markets in total. Each participating market had 4 lead-up shows and a closing show with DJ Mustard. We created content with TouchTunes, driving On Premise participation and engagement as each DJ curated a local playlist that came with free credits courtesy of Coors Light.
Each Coors Light reFRESH market got its own story via OOH (equity), local DJs drawing crowds to buy Coors Light on-premise (Soundtrack), and content surrounding each refurbished court (Full Court). The program wasn't a template dropped into each market. It was a set of agile playbooks that let each city write its own version.
In all, we produced a national TV and digital campaign, with hyper-local OOH in every market along with the series of events in each city that grew as the program lived on. Each event produced content that lived online long after the events ended, and potential consumers got to feel the brand at the concerts and via refreshed basketball courts. The Diggy/Fizzy framework before we called it that: turn a standard beer campaign into something consumers can feel, with a national network of events to support that generated more content to bring more awareness. Every production decision was made through the lens of "what will people share in the group chat?"
The reFRESH platform ran across 12 markets, produced 30+ concerts, and generated hundreds of millions of social impressions and engagements over its multi-year run. Full Court reFRESH activation markets saw a 25%+ sales lift, which I'm proud of. But I'm most proud of what it proved: experiential can be a media channel, not just an event expense.
The platform earned 2 awards for On Premise activation for the Touchtunes programming via Soundtrack, and Multicultural Program of the Year internally for Full Court. More importantly, it established the content-forward approach that became the template for how the brand engaged fans going forward.
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