From a boring rewards program
To the greatest giveaway the world has ever seen.
CHALLENGE
Archer Roose, purveyor of premium wine in cans, wanted to launch a rewards program. It was your pretty standard, “Spend X and get X back in wine bucks” kind of approach. One we thought would simply get lost in the ether of the thousands of other rewards programs of similar ilk in the world.
STRATEGY
To get people to pay attention to the most basic marketing program in the history of marketing, we needed something as bold as the brand we were building. Something that would confuse and maybe delight, but also definitely confuse again.
CREATIVE SOLUTION
So we gave away free snakes. At least, that’s what we promised. Our new rewards program was simple. Just purchase 100,000 cases of Archer Roose wine ($6.4m) and we’ll send you a free poisonous snake of our choosing. We promoted the hell out of it with a video from Elizabeth Banks, a web experience, endless social posts and more. A week later, after causing quite a ruckus we might add, we apologized for the program and announced the real one. Worked like a charm.
PHASE 1: The Snakes
We flooded the market promoting the new Archer Roose Snake Rewards Program — purchase a hefty amount of Archer Roose and we’ll send you a free poisonous snake. The internet went wild.
PHASE 2: The Apology
After five straight days of offering to mail poisonous snakes to people's homes, Elizabeth Banks apologized for the legally murky rewards program and announced it would be replaced with a new and improved, reptile-free program. The stunt catapulted the brand's actual Rewards Program to the front of the conversation, smashing every KPI along the way.
"The snake campaign is a refreshing antidote to all that bucolic overkill. It's also a canny strategic move for social media, where jokey content has a better chance at going viral than yet another shot of a white woman in a big hat drinking Chardonnay under a tree."
