Gaming and esports have continued to over-index as a primary passion point for Bud Light's 25 - 34 year old male audience and the brand was continuing to deepen its presence in the vertical. With esports team, league and streamer partnerships, Bud Light was beginning to cement its place as the self-proclaimed “Official Beer of Gaming,” however, those efforts were not raising purchase intent and brand preference in significant ways.

We were challenged with raising purchase intent and brand preference with LDA beer-drinking gamers in the target segment with an earned media effort that would reach this audience.

The broad idea - after understanding the scale of the news coverage on next gen console releases - was to add excitement to the console wars in a legitimate way with a Bud Light-inspired console. For the audience to see a reflection of themselves in the effort, this could not be seen simply as a publicity stunt. It had to be a functional device that elevated the beer, raised the bar on the 4th quarter console wars and felt like an attainable product.

This led us to creating the “BL6” in the shape of a six-pack, integrating beer-cooling chambers, custom games, and a projector into the device so the console could be as portable as a beer.

We gave it an exterior polish and personality that elevated the brand’s respect for the gaming community, and a tech back-end that felt like a gaming obsessed brand fan could have made it.

Creating the BL6 required rapid 3D printing prototyping for the key elements to understand scale as we wanted to fit the key components in a 6-pack shaped housing. Components included a wireless projector, a tablet PC, fans and insulation, wireless controller slots and custom fabricated koozie slots (powered) – all in effort to create a fully wireless solution and the worlds first-ever self-powered 6-pack beer koozie.

The exterior construction is a sanded 3D printed molded plastic that allowed us to feature the Bud Light blue with a custom-designed exterior wrap to reflect the brand ID and give visceral reference to the fact that the console is also a beer koozie.

The final construction is 1.7x scale of a carry 6-pack. The packaging was inspired by major retail console launch packaging to create a true object of desire for livestream unboxings of the device.

The BL6 did indeed hijack the console wars as we chose not to employ any teaser elements. We launched the campaign with targeted media exclusives and livestream events, employing the spirit of an exclusive surprise product drop popular with the target segment.

The US campaign expanded to Bud Light Canada, eclipsing all goals with 186M impressions (goal 75M), 241 placements (goal 100) and most importantly raising purchase intent amongst the target audience by 12% and raising Bud Light 9% in top 3 favorite beers for LDA beer drinking gamers.

The BL6 website (https://www.budlight.com/bl6) and an unboxing livestream expanded on the virtues of the BL6 and the spirit of the brand with a “We Didn’t Think it Would Work Either” attitude. We made one BL6 available to the public with a 100% charitable auction on the brand’s ShopBeerGear.com website, selling the console for $24,000 USD ($5,000 USD goal).