Background
Karjala-beer has been a sponsor of the Finnish Ice Hockey team for years and they wanted to get more out of the deal during the Ice Hockey World Championships in Canada. The client wanted to strengthen Karjala’s urban image by reaching the target group – Finnish men – at some other time than during World Cup matches in the evenings.
Target Group and Objectives
Karjala wanted to tackle their competitors during the World Championship. They wanted to utilize their small media budget efficiently and create concrete sales by some other means than by lowering the price. The goal was to keep their market share at the same level as the year before.
Creative
We decided to take over the daytime instead of the evenings when the matches were broadcast on TV. The chosen media were the web and radio. We were aware that the target group is not interested in traditional advertising, but we needed strong branded content.
We created a story of a Finnish guy, who made a bet that he can get into the World Championship final without spending a dime of his own money. We planned the story together with Radio Rock, who were interested in a new way to create Ice Hockey -related content that people would talk about.
So came into life the memorable story of Pete in Canada.
Story
Pete started his quest by collecting money for the travel by putting collection buckets into bars around Helsinki. To support Pete, we created a Facebook group, where Pete (his real name) invited his real friends. The popularity of the groups gave the story credibility. The hosts of Radio Rock’s morning show happened to notice the buckets and decided to help him raise the money. They got a sponsor – Karjala – and thus the brand was introduced to the story in a natural way.
Karjala sponsored Pete with plane tickets to Canada, but there he had to manage by himself. As a counterpart Pete had to document his journey in his blog with daily video reports.
We used banner advertising and Radio Rock to drive consumers to the blog. During his journey, Pete came across a multitude of setbacks, Finnish Ice Hockey players, Russian organized black market ticket traders and fans.
After Pete was featured on the front page of a local Canadian newspaper, he became a small-time celebrity among the World Championship crowd and a marked man for the organizers, which made his job so much harder. Nevertheless Pete got into the Final and the campaign reached its goals easily.
Results
Pete’s log was visited by over 100 000 times during the two and a half weeks and his quirky video reports which often featured the brand were watched through YouTube for 125 000 times. The blog had very lively commenting by consumers and on top of all we got free publicity in a dozen Finnish media and in a few Canadian media covered the story too.
The combination of radio and banner advertising worked exceptionally well and click rates were phenomenal. The campaign was on air for more than 300 minutes, but the best thing was that the Karjala beer cans were sold over a million pieces during April and May. The sales were up 46% with a budget of 20% less than the year before.
The results assured also the Effie Finland jury, which awarded the campaign a silver Effie in web-based campaigns.
Campaign elements
