Michelob Ultra is part of the Anheuser-Busch family, a company that inked an exclusive deal with the NFL for advertising rights during the Super Bowl. Miller Lite was completely shut out of the game and certainly couldn't compete with Michelob's budget. We didn't have the money to grab attention with celebrities or a multi-million TV spot. Michelob often positions its 95 calorie beer as a healthy alternative, even though Miller Lite is only one calorie more. This one-calorie difference became the crux of our idea, giving us an unusual, eye-catching way to crash Michelob's party. Our goal was to drive awareness of Miller Lite as an equally healthy option among young, calorie-conscious beer consumers, along with consideration of brand as a whole.

Our solution was to create a simple giveaway site that would reward visitors with free beer. However, we made the microsite active ONLY during Michelob Ultra's 30 seconds of paid Super Bowl airtime. And then we made the site's URL so long that it would require one calorie and much longer than 30 seconds to type. We knew that Super Bowl viewers would switch to typing on their phones, unable to pay attention to their TV screens when Michelob's spot aired.

Our work was based on several cultural and behavioral insights. For one, we knew that our target audience of 20-something sports fans were unable to watch TV without a phone in their hand and that we could capitalize on their need to fidget with a second screen. Secondly, by making our Long URL explicitly state that users shouldn't copy and paste, we knew that we were essentially issuing a challenge to the Internet, which inherently defies the wishes and advice of authority figures and brands. And the Internet certainly took the bait. Our reverse-psychology tactic created a natural spread online as Twitter users and Redditors (two of the most active online communities for our target) typed and shared the 836-character URL among their peers.

Our copy-and-paste-proof URL ran in one of America's high profile print placements—the back page of the New York Times, exactly one week before Super Bowl Sunday. Based on our research, this was the perfect time to create anticipation for our big moment while still being timely. In other words, we launched early enough to make a splash, but not so early that we faded into irrelevance by the time the Super Bowl arrived.

While it might seem counter intuitive to target 20-something, health-conscious beer drinkers in such an old-fashioned medium, the print ad ended up being a highly shareable asset online. Photos of our print ad were naturally more interesting than a purely digital file.

We added humor by making the URL self-explanatory. It (verbosely) explained where to go, when, and how to not "cheat" by copying. The URL itself replaced the need for any additional copy, which consumers loved.

+1B Media Impressions

438 earned placements (including Forbes, USA Today, People, Fox News)

17,000 visits during Super Bowl, with all prizes being given away within seconds of the site going live

+849% volume of conversation

Reddit posts organically reached +18M users