Mountain Dew wanted to challenge consumers in the South Division to break the monotony of home life (during Covid-19) and safely “Claim the Outdoors”. Mountain Dew wanted to increase brand awareness and sales focusing on their “Heartland Hero” persona by leveraging authentic influencers on social channels. The campaign asked users to share pics of their adventures on social as well as enter to win prizes such as a new Ford Bronco and exclusive outdoor giveaways. The brand was looking at a variety of goals and KPIs including contest entries, video views, follower growth to show engagement while also tracking sales lift in the South Division.
Mountain Dew has a reputation for standing out with promotions and partnerships as bold and energizing as its flavor. In the midst of COVID-19, the brand wanted to challenge consumers in their South Division to take a break from the monotony of home life and safely “Claim the Outdoors.” Amplified by Dew influencers, the campaign asked users to share pics of their adventures on social as well as enter to win prizes such as a new Ford Bronco and exclusive outdoor getaways.
As the digital lead, Union provided all necessary creative direction and social planning for each influencer across multiple channels, as well as laying out the paid media strategy to augment the work of the influencers. By pairing branded creative with each influencer’s authentic personality and voice, we created an award-winning campaign that engaged key personas, increased entries and drove product sales.
With all the organic content coming from Dew’s selected influencers, our strategists conducted a thorough channel audit for each influencer to understand what content their followers would respond to, the best channels for each piece of content and scheduling recommendations that would draw the largest engagement. That audit informed our creative work, resulting in a unique direction for each influencer, with each post laddering up to a larger organic strategy that would be supported and accelerated through targeted paid media.
This campaign brought the unique challenge of incorporating influencer marketing into a robust paid media strategy. Additionally, this was a predominantly social campaign during a time when the industry was facing issues with Facebook’s policies. So our strategists took a more nuanced approach, looking to Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat as a means to further drive entries. Outside of social, we also leveraged a range of programmatic display, targeting users who either saw a branded Mountain Dew spot or a commercial relevant to our Heartland Hero persona (think Cabelas or Bass Pro Shop). We served these users, on their second screen, with an engaging “Claim the Outdoors” sizzle video, quickly followed by a retargeted static ad encouraging consumers to enter for a chance to win.
Since all production had to be handled remotely, our creative team worked closely with each influencer to capture the raw images and videos for each post, sending the content back to us to edit and finalize before publishing. All of this was done within days, sometimes hours, of the post dates, requiring our studio team to quickly create specific graphics packages for each influencer. This more flexible, responsive creative process ensured proper brand alignment and helped maintain contest awareness within each influencer’s unique audience.
In its two-month run, “Claim the Outdoors” saw relentless engagement, not only driving thousands of contest entries but also significantly increasing Dew sales across the South Division. The campaign performed so well that it was recognized with the 2020 “Kickass Campaign” Bevvie Award at PepsiCo as the 360 marketing campaign that delivered and exceeded on it’s KPIs.
In its two-month run, “Claim the Outdoors” saw relentless engagement, not only driving thousands of contest entries but also significantly increasing Dew sales across the South Division. The campaign performed so well that it was recognized with the 2020 “Kickass Campaign” Bevvie Award at PepsiCo as the 360 marketing campaign that delivered and exceeded on it’s KPIs.
14,000 Contest Entries | 2.2 Million Video Views | 19% Sales Lift
