As one of the Super Bowl's longest-standing advertisers, Budweiser wanted to take a stance on a vital issue beer brands don't often talk about: drunk driving. Budweiser cares too much about its beer to not care about the people who drink it, so the brand decided to use advertising's biggest stage--the Super Bowl--to confront the problem head-on and start a conversation. Together with agency partner VaynerMedia, Budweiser launched its digital #GiveADamn campaign, leveraging social media's power to inspire a movement. The ask of consumers was simple: Stand with Bud's message against drinking and driving via social actions, and make it home safely.
As Super Bowl 50 approached, Budweiser's social media strategy was focused on raising awareness of its initiative and encouraging social media users to stand with its message against drunk driving. Most importantly, it asked social media users to make a plan that would get them home safely after the big game.
VaynerMedia took a cue from the brand's "Give A Damn" TV commercial featuring Helen Mirren, and focused on digital channels to amplify the anti-drunk driving message.
Budweiser kicked off the movement at the beginning of Super Bowl week with the launch of a custom Twitter emoji. The goal of the custom emoji was to help Budweiser raise safe-driving awareness in a platform-specific, timely, and engaging way. Every time someone tweeted with "#GiveADamn," an emoji showing a hand responsibly dropping keys was auto-populated, visualizing the ultimate goal of our movement and reinforcing our safe driving messaging.
Budweiser then teamed up with 10 social influencers to extend the #GiveADamn campaign's reach to relevant communities in an authentic way. Influencers encouraged fans during the week leading up to Super Bowl to start planning ways home after the big game. When Sunday rolled around, the influencers all convened to watch the game together. They posted updates from their party, encouraging people to both have fun watching football, and to be smart about the way they were choosing to get home.
In keeping with Helen Mirren's no-nonsense tone in Budweiser's Super Bowl TVC, VaynerMedia created an "8 Ways Home" hero video for YouTube. There's absolutely no excuse for driving drunk, so we made a tongue-in-cheek video reminding people just how easy it is to plan a safe way home. The video highlighted the multitude of options to avoid drinking and driving, from crashing on a friend's couch to taking a rickshaw.
Budweiser wanted to continue the conversation after the Super Bowl was over, but knew it would be up against a lot of noise on one of the year's busiest media days. So, we took to Imgur to continue the movement on a niche, on-demo platform that is the number 1 web destination for males 18-34. Our concept was inspired by the "apology cake" trend, when people bake cakes to apologize for actions from the night before. We made our own funny, honest, and relatable apology cakes to encourage fans to thank (or apologize to) the friends who got them home safely, in a way that was native to Imgur and its community.
From February 2nd to February 7th (Super Bowl Sunday), the #GiveADamn movement caught on in a big way: The hashtag and custom emoji were used more than 47,000 times, garnering more than 181 million impressions on Twitter. On Super Bowl Sunday alone, Budweiser drove 31,000 mentions and 86 million impressions on Twitter.
The content posted by our social influencers drove more than 12,800 hashtag uses and 6,000 clicks to the online television commercial to hear Helen's message. Best of all, it helped Budweiser's safe driving movement reach 30 million consumers.
The Imgur content garnered more than 1.1 million unique page views, as well as an 87.71% upvote ratio. Budweiser successfully continued the #GiveADamn conversation after the big game and was the first CPG advertiser to activate on the platform.
Above all, Budweiser encouraged people to passionately discuss an extremely critical, timely, and surmountable issue.
