People expect Bud Light to deliver compelling content during the Super Bowl, but to engage millennials, we needed to deliver on their values of experiences, living IRL (in real life), and doing vs just telling.

We wanted to turn what could have easily been a closed-set commercial shoot, into a live event real people could experience, even if that meant shooting just weeks before the game. Putting on such an event has its challenges. Everyone who engaged with the brand at the event had to be screened to be legal drinking age. We also faced regulations in terms of what can be shown in content (on TV, no one can be shown drinking or imply over-consumption).

Employing cutting-edge technology, Bud Light created the world’s largest game of Pac-Man. It was a LIVE event with a giant audience, using hidden cameras so that one completely real, completely unsuspecting guy could have the night of his life.

It was critical the game work exactly like the original 8-bit arcade version, so we innovated methods never before used in a commercial production. To track our hero in real-time, we designed wearable technology that seamlessly turned off the lights on the floor, which calculated his score on a giant scoreboard, all while running for his life from LED-lit, color-changing ghosts.

We broke a world record for the largest game of live Pac-Man while making a Super Bowl spot which generated 14MM views prior to the game, and surpassed our goal for total views by 27% (just 9 days after the Super Bowl), for a total of over 38.5MM views.

Viewers spontaneously added their own hashtag #iwanttoplay and demanded the music track. Online buzz from the live event grew with media coverage on prominent TV shows, and in the end, generated 1,400 unique stories for a total of over 1 billion impressions—over 5x the typical Super Bowl spot. And we beat our 2014 sales volume during the weeks before and after the Super Bowl.

In short, we “leveled up” our “Up For Whatever” brand campaign.