The Bulls and Anheuser-Busch have been partners for many years, and each year work together to ensure that Bulls assets are being used in the best way possible to support Anheuser-Busch's marketing objectives. This year, the focus has been on supporting Budweiser's "Legendary" brand positioning.
Dating back to the 1870s, Budweiser has one of the richest legacies among beer companies. The challenge they posed to the Bulls was to figure out how to support this "legendary" identity by using our own brand, assets, and fan base.
To seamlessly promote the legendary lager, Budweiser and the Chicago Bulls teamed up to use the Bulls rich history to reinforce Budweiser's "Legendary" tag line. Working with a local Chicago-based graphic artist, we brought iconic Bulls moments, from both the past and present days, to life in short, news-feed focused, animated videos. These videos are all short, between five and 10 seconds, and play on loop in our fan's newsfeeds. All videos end with a Budweiser logo and copy that supports their initiatives: #LegendaryMoments and #ThisBudsForYou.
So far this season, we've released five of these videos, covering classic moments such as Scottie Pippen's legendary dunk over Patrick Ewing (in 1994) and John Paxson's game winning shot to secure the Bulls' third championship in three years in the 1993-94 NBA season. We've also celebrated modern day moments, such as Zach LaVine's first dunk for the Chicago Bulls.
All of the videos have been built around legendary historic Bulls moments, and seamlessly feature Budweiser branding in both the animation and the copy.
Furthermore, to reinforce this positioning to our fan base, Budweiser is now integrated on our Bulls history page to further help drive the association between Budweiser and the Chicago Bulls' legendary history.
To date, the efforts have had more than five million organic impressions and more than one million video views. For the Bulls, we've been happy that we've been able to create branded content that our fanbase has shown to enjoy, while also promoting an organic alignment between our team and Budweiser in a modern and social-first way.
On top of this, the Chicago Bulls were recently award Anheuser-Busch's "Partner of the Year" award – showcasing that Budweiser has been happy with the work that the Bulls have been doing with assets and activations across the entire organization to help bring the partnership to life to our fans.
