Bud Light’s Not So Platinum Social Media Campaign – Super Bowl 2012

So it’s probably safe to assume that everyone saw the Super Bowl commercials. There were some great commercials this year all trying to take the conversation around their brand online with QR codes, shazam, URLs, and hashtags. I guess we can call all these call to actions the start of the Social TV trend.

One that stuck out to me was Bud Light’s new Platinum beer commercials. The commercials were ok, but what stood out to me was the use of the #MakeItPlatinum hashtag which encouraged people to tweet about the beer.  

Since I work in Social Media I like to see how brands execute their campaigns. So I jumped to twitter to check out the #MakeItPlatinum hashtag. A lot of people were talking about the beer but to my surprise there was no Bud Light interaction with these tweets, and what surprised me more was that this was because there was no Bud Light Platinum twitter account. 

Why would you pay millions of dollars to create a Super Bowl ad which encourages people to talk about your brand online and you don’t take the extra effort to be online and talk with them? I feel like this was a big missed opportunity for Bud Light. They could have interacted with people and worked to build the brand and create strong advocates of their new beer.  

So seeing a missed opportunity I figured I could make a twitter account and show how Bud Light could have executed their twitter campaign correctly. I created an account using the username @BLPlatinumBeer (now suspended) and branded it accordingly, keep in mind this was done in less then 30mins which shows how easily Bud Light could have done this. I jumped right to search.twitter and set up a search for #MakeItPlatinum, as well as “Bud Light Platinum.”  There were so many positive tweets with this hashtag and keywords that it would have taken 2-3 people to fully interact with all the tweets. 

I was able to quickly engage a lot of these tweets though RTs and @mentions. The account has suspended by twitter towards the end of the 4th quarter of the Super Bowl for impersonation of a brand. So I had the account active for 3 quarters of the Super Bowl and I tweeted about 90 tweets which were RTs and mentions to people who were enjoying the beer. 

This just shows that there was a lot of potential interaction around the brand. If you search #MakeItPlatinum you’ll see a huge mix of pictures and comments about the beer. This is a great opportunity for Bud Light to engage with customers. If I was able to do this in about 2-3hrs then an offical account with a social media plan could really grow brand awareness and a following on twitter.

So did Bud Light have a great commercial which got people talking about their brand? YES

Did Bud Light correctly execute their social media campaign and get the most out of their advertisement? NO

Conclusion: I think Bud Light really dropped the ball on this social media campaign. They spent a lot of money to get people talking about their brand on twitter but they didn’t show up to the #MakeItPlatinum party! #FAIL!  Bud Light could have used this opportunity to build up their social accounts, which would have given them the opportunity to market and grow their brand for years to come. If brands want to encourage conversations through social media they need to be monitoring the conversation and participating in it. 

Question:

1. Do you think Bud Light missed out by not being on twitter?  

2. What could have been done better to make this campaign a success?