Insight
POKER is a billion dollar brand in terms of revenue is Colombia’s largest beer brand with 42% volume share, and is one of the top three most profitable SABMiller brands; nevertheless being a leader demands a greater effort, that’s why for the last six years thanks to a coherent and consistent platform based on friendship, Poker is considered the brand “that join friends together to share good moments just being themselves”
How to keep feeding the link between brand and young people when nowadays friends are more and more involved in an online environment and the way they acquire information and entertain is changing; in other words, the audience is moving from traditional media to internet in multi-platforms.
The brand needs to take part in the digital evolution in the country, let’s see; Internet penetration is 52%, smartphone penetration increased from 32% to 45% in only one year. Colombians spend 4.2 hours on average per week online. Colombia is one of the highest users of social networks in LATAM. If YouTube were a TV channel, it would be the third largest in terms of audience. On average, a Colombian watches 168 videos on YouTube a month (120 videos last year) so; this is an entire new landscape! And Poker definitely must to be part of this.
Strategy
Friendship in Colombia is full of variety; and no matter how different friends are, Poker unites them to spend time in their own way. One of the most powerful things is realising the coincidences that exist in terms of friendship; everybody has a lazy friend who never works, or criticises the boy/girl-friend of your friend, or all have to empower this friend who doesn’t have lucky with ladies, or covers up their lies.
Under this overview, the strategy was to create a content platform to highlight the value of this typical insight as the axis in the friendship of any Colombian.
That’s the way that “ENTRE PANAS” (Among Friends) born; a web series (to the style of SITCom) where humour and diversity of friends had to be essential; with the highest quality and under the signature of an important producer 64A Films, experienced actors, a libretto rich in insights of Colombian friendship, in which the brand would have a more natural exposure space and not the traditional advertising.
Execution
After 18 exiting months of deep research about the typical insights or anecdotes about friendship, the agency had enough material for maybe three seasons! Under the direction of the famous movie director Carlos Moreno, it designed a series of scripts; the result was a first season of 8 chapters 5 minutes in average, with weekly transmission.
The series was made in six months, between the previous production and the edition, with a cost not superior to that of a high level commercial (US$150.000). Fort the launching, a media event took place, thus generating a free press product, together with a campaign equivalent to 15% of a massive campaign.
ENTRE PANAS created a Facebook fan page of its own to deliver credibility and to allow characters to become “real” online; the fan page’s organic reach was 17,000 in only two months. Poker brand rebranded it´s YouTube channel to become EntrePanas, aiming to build community and strengthen the brand´s channel performance.
The investment behind each episode assured reach and interaction with the content at an effective cost vs. TV with the benefit of being able to target precisely. (The average cost per view was of 1 cent).
The series was launched in a press conference held by Poker along with 64Afilms, the actors and the director. This helped the media embrace the story through them; $70,000 USD worth of free press was generated. The actors were part of this innovative project which resulted in them promoting the series through their own social media.
Results
EntrePanas was developed as part of the future of advertising, where brands interrupt less and give consumers things that they are willing to consume, when and wherever they want, while strengthening the brand’s equity and delivering the brand propose of “enhancing those good moments with friends”. The results were outstanding.
In this campaign was invested 15% that is focused in a massive or regular campaign but overcome the recognition compared with other communications of the brand.
More than 11 million views for episodes and teasers; no any web series in Colombia had reached this number of views (even Adulto Contemporáneo, which was consider the most important to the date reached more than 2 million in 8 chapters) 1.2 million views on average per episode, 150% vs initial target.
EntrePanas reached 29% of total consumers and 32% of young consumers with longer content than a TV ad. The reach on TV would have been 32 % with a 30 seconds piece with the same investment.
On average in Colombia, only 1% of the views from brand generated videos are organic, however, for EntrePanas, 21% of the views are organic… and still growing without additional investment.
70% of people that started watching organically watched the whole episodes.
Each episode got more than 500 comments on average, 98% of them were positive. The most common word was "hahahaha", followed by: "good", "excellent", "love it" and "the best", along with many friend tags.
BRAND EQUITY:
- Those who watched the series have 11% more attitudinal equity than those who didn't (40 Vs. 36)
- During Q3, its main attribute "Knows about friendship" grew +8.7 pp and "It's for young people" grew +6.4 pp.