The start of the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged a category in flux. When the world stopped, cocktails started to pour. Booze was booming. The spirits category was actually seeing growth, fueled by pre-quarantine stock-ups and at-home cocktail exploration. But as behaviors adapted, category brand loyalty plummeted. Drinkers were less choosy, taking what they could find for their evolving needs. How could Beam sustain growth during and post-pandemic while creating relevance with consumers? Our goal: to ensure Beam Bourbons were being chosen in this reality and to give them texture and meaning in the social space. Our movement centered around getting people to rethink Happy Hour and get them to talk about the impact of this new ritual.

The blurry lines between work life and home life altered our sense of space. People needed moments of pause – and creating a ritualistic buffer zone could help. We drew inspiration from a key time frame once reserved for Happy Hour or commute, 6-7pm, to serve as a new ritualistic pause with Bourbon…

6ourbon 7ime – it’s right in the name, 6–7pm. Inviting consumers to reclaim that hour, to set aside space to sit back and savor a moment for themselves. The campaign look and feel used cues to remind you that 6pm means it’s time to close your laptop and kick back.

Beam’s Bourbons’ liquid profiles – and the moments they’re created for – made them a match for this new restorative ritual.

To authentically show up in this context, we created a multichannel, masterbrand experience that gave people the tools they needed to take some much-needed “Me Time.”

Living and working in the same place was taking a toll. To cope, Americans filled their liquor cabinets. Through a combination of social listening and qualitative research, we began to see this new environment take shape. Social mentions of “I need a drink” increased by 500% and qualitative survey respondents repeatedly posted pictures of cocktails in-hand when asked what “Me Time” looks like.

Since this moment was more about release than turning up, Bourbon was a natural fit. While competitors doubled down on trying to show how liquid rose to the occasion, Beam-Suntory owned the moment, addressing a human-centric need: setting boundaries and reinstating happy hour.

Beam gave people the very thing they had been missing early in the pandemic: permission to reclaim their space and time. One full hour to relax and decompress – without pings, chimes or dings.

To encourage immediate adoption and maximize impact of our new ritual, we launched with a simple CTA to “reclaim 6-7pm” on social and online video, aiming to meet worn-out workers where they were seeking space.

On Twitter, we leaned into platform dynamics and mechanisms, leveraging our crafted campaign visual system (silhouettes, sundial imagery) in a first-view video and like-to-remind post to make users aware of the program and seamlessly remind them to take part.

Influencers joined in, next, adding a human appeal. To build momentum, this group, led by celebrities like Maria Sharapova, Taye Diggs, Charli XCX and Joel McHale, spread the word and showed how they, too, were reclaiming their time from 6-7pm. We chose trusted voices that were known Bourbon drinkers and were busy, especially during the pandemic. These authentic, relatable takes on 6ourbon 7ime inspired fellow Bourbon drinkers to start reclaiming lost time that was rightfully theirs.

In a category of lone wolves, this Beam masterbrand message – to decompress and enjoy a Bourbon – hit the right notes, affecting social behavior and driving incremental sales.

Leveraging brand lift studies, we saw above-average lifts in awareness, recall and brand association.

•Increase in social SOV – Jim Beam 44% in Q1 (vs. 6% in Q4 2020).

•YouTube Directors Mix drove 7.4% Ad Recall lift compared to a 4.7% industry benchmark.

•Twitter effectively produced significant brand metric growth among engaged users.

•Social mentions doubled our goal (Jim Beam mentions increased 1131% during that time frame).

Not only did participants share how they were taking time and space using #6ourbon7ime, many literally blocked off their calendars using custom calendar block functionality on the 6ourbon7ime.com microsite.

The campaign drove over 6x more unique visitors to the microsite than our goal and more than 2x calendar block download goal.