This campaign aimed to drive consumer awareness of Mountain Dew and Ruffles flavors and positive brand associations with younger demographics through the power of hoops, flavor and the food occasion. Our objective was to urge Millennial and Gen Z cola drinkers to adopt Mountain Dew into their rotation by leveraging their love of bold flavors and their passion for hoops. Through influencer strategy we drove buzz around the products by highlighting the connection between basketball and good food, as well as the bold and delicious flavor of Mtn Dew, ultimately recruiting and grow the volume of Millennials and Gen Z Dew drinkers by driving relevance.
Using MRI data, we came up with custom influencer categories that aligned with core Mtn Dew and basketball audiences in the South Division, ensuring authenticity. Tapping into peak basketball season relevance, we created an influencer campaign that leveraged selected influencer pairs to go head-to-head in each week’s food focused match-up on TikTok and Instagram. Competing against each other in a food and hoops themed challenge, they each represented one of the pairings and encouraged their followers to vote on their side.
Coming up with a campaign centered around these influencer match-ups, we encouraged our creators to playfully compete each week to pit Mtn Dew and food pairings against each other. Influencers also encouraged followers to vote for their assigned Dew + food combination in the main Flavor Slam landing page. Our challenge was to continue the campaign’s momentum over the course of 7 weeks. To do so, we had our creators surprise and delight their followers with Dew and food themed prizes, encouraging them to check in next week for more chances to win. We were also challenged with keeping costs low over the course of this long campaign, while still needing influencers to post on a weekly cadence. To drive further involvement and build strong relationships with our creators, we supplied with free product, exclusive merch and allowed them to create content they already enjoyed posting in their regular feeds. This resulted in content that performed on-par and better than their average content, which is a major feat for sponsored content.
With our 4 influencer partners, this program overall generated over 1.28M impressions, over 181K engagements, and 3,800 traffic clicks over the 7-week campaign. We also achieved an average engagement of 14.2% across channels and content. We had several influencers’ content go viral, which we define as the initial audience’s reaction to content, when compared to the influencer’s follower count.
