A well-known Colombian beer brand, Bavaria Brewery’s Poker was up against a series of changes affecting the local beer category, not least that consumers were drinking less overall. To reverse a negative start to the year, Bavaria (owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev) & DDB Colombia set out to increase sales by 5% during March 2018. The brand was able to successfully re-engage its audience by creatively navigating around the no-advertising policy of what had become one of Colombia’s most popular social media apps: Whatsapp.
The result was “Amigos de Whatsapp.” The campaign, launched in March 2018, effectively differentiated Poker in a competitive beer category, achieved a 12.5% sales increase in two months time and went on to win the Grand Effie in the 2019 Effie Awards Colombia competition – the second Grand Effie win for the brand in four years. It also earned trophies in the Promotions (Gold), Beverages – Alcohol (Gold) and New Product or Service (Silver) categories.
We asked the DDB Colombia team for more insight on their winning work. Read on for our conversation with Borja de la Plaza, President & CEO, Jorge Becerra, VP Planning, Natalia Fuentes, Account Director and Miguel Bueno, Senior Planner.
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Tell us about your Grande Effie-winning campaign, “Amigos de Whatsapp?” What were your objectives?
DDB: The last few years have been of great movement for the beer category in Colombia. The emergence of new competitors, the impacts of constant tax reforms, the regulations of the new police code, as well as various changes in consumer habits and preferences, have made Poker’s leadership threatened from different fronts. Our consumer target are young people who drink less beer every day, which makes us play a game of stimulating their consumption of beer. It is a context in which we have to make them constantly fall in love with the category and with our brand.
Our objective was to reverse a negative start of the year, increasing the sales of the brand by 5% during the month of March 2018.
What was the strategic insight that led to your big idea?
DDB: For years, Poker has positioned itself as the beer of friendship: We have always said that where there are friends, there is Poker. However, due to advertising restrictions, by the beginning of 2018 no brand could be present in the new “habitat” of friendship: WhatsApp groups (82% of people in Colombia use this platform as the main means of talking with their friends).
Friendship is not only alive in bars and streets now. Friends are constantly engaging with each other on Whatsapp.
This leads to a decrease of meetings with each other. Therefore, as a brand that talks about doing whatever it takes for friendship, to encourage their gatherings we had to start where they were: engaging with them using their own language, memes, posts and videos, through the platforms where they are constantly talking to each other.
How did you bring “Amigos de Whatsapp” to life?
DDB: This was a campaign that didn’t give away cars, trips, or money with our beer bottle caps. Instead, our gift was friends who consumers would want to have within their Whatsapp groups.
During the month of March 2018, under the caps of 160 million bottles of our beer, we printed phone numbers that consumers could add to their Whatsapp contacts. Each number had one of 14 different bot-friends with whom people could interact and receive tailor-made content, and which gave them the chance to win different prizes.
We created over 6,000 pieces of content that were distributed throughout the month of the campaign.
How did you know the work worked? What was the most significant or surprising result of the effort?
DDB: By the end of the campaign, Poker reached a sales increase of 12.5%, achieving an increase of 1 point in their market share (that, in this category, translates to 9 million additional US dollars for the brand).
The campaign accomplished over 32 million interactions on one social network, Whatsapp. This is over 1 million daily interactions. This means that we increased our social media traffic by 110,000%, an unimaginable number, as this would have cost 3 million dollars in digital media if we wanted to achieve it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
We reached over 7 billion impressions during the month of the campaign, including 28 million views of all of our video content.
We exceeded the regional benchmark for video retention by 200%.
The organic view rate reached over 70%.
We earned over 1,313,000,000 Colombian pesos in free press.
And the most important KPI for Poker, “A beer that I like to share with my friends,” increased to 72.2% during the month of the campaign (from our average benchmark of 62%) – not only overcoming the national average but establishing a new record for all Bavaria brands.
In the end, we also collected thousands of cellphone numbers from our consumers, strengthening our data base with more information from our clients – data that we have started to employ in our loyalty and promotional platforms.
What were the biggest learnings you took away from this campaign?
DDB: In Colombia, the beer category has a large media investment. And it relies on creativity to differentiate brands from each other. This makes it more challenging every time we launch a new campaign.
We have a brand that is not only a leader in sales, but is also best positioned on a communication level. Therefore, any effort we make has to be bold, big, and has to impact the culture of our consumer to become outstanding.
For this campaign, what is most relevant is that we stepped out of the boundaries of communication and did something that was never done before: advertise through a medium that doesn’t allow advertising, Whatsapp, and have consumers become the ones who willingly add our number and start a conversation.
And this was our learning. We have to challenge the “status quo” and come up with different ways to engage with our ever-changing consumer.
This is your second Grand Effie win for Poker (congratulations!). What do you think has been the most significant contributor to this ongoing success?
DDB: We have challenged ourselves as a team of clients and agencies to look at a campaign not only as a business challenge but as something that constantly breaks everyday life for our consumers. This idea, which is talked about by hundreds of brands, really takes the form of action for us. Our campaigns are data-driven, and we constantly look for media innovations. These [Poker] campaigns are a sample of our actions going beyond the speech, and this is the “modus operandi” of our team.
As President & CEO, Borja de la Plaza leads the DDB agencies in Colombia, a group of more than 500 people which he took over in November 2016. During his tenure, the agency became a creative powerhouse, winning the “Agency of the Year” title two times. Prior to moving to Colombia, he was Chief Operating Officer at DDB Latina’s Miami HQ, responsible for Latin America, Spain and the US Hispanic market. Borja was born in Spain, lived in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States – he also holds American citizenship – before moving to Colombia where he lives now with his wife Connie and his dog Rocco.
Jorge Becerra, VP Planning, runs the strategy department at DDB in Colombia. At only 33 years old (13 working at Omnicom), he has been responsible for developing integrated communications strategies for some of the most valuable brands in Colombia and Latin America. Formerly Director of Planning at Sancho BBDO, Jorge is one of the youngest advertising executives in Colombia. In the last couple of years, he and his team have designed some of the most successful strategic platforms in his country (working for clients such as McDonald’s, ABInBev, Avianca Airlines, Quaker, Bayer, LG Electronics, Johnson & Johnson, Casino Group, Pepsi, Huawei, Claro and BBVA). In 2018, he was named by Scopen as one of the ten most admired professionals in the Colombian advertising industry, and he has also been recognized as one of the most influential advertising professionals in Latin America, according to Adlatina magazine. He has won more than 70 Effies, 3 Grand Effies, 2 Cannes Lions, and several other awards such as D&AD, One Show, Clio Awards, London Festival, Wave, El Sol, and El Ojo. He lives with his wife in Bogotá and is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist at private and public forums on best practices in marketing, consumer trends, and innovation.
Natalia Fuentes, Account Director
Miguel Bueno, Senior Planner
