These days a huge number of cable-cutting sports fans resort to shady pirate streaming sites to watch games. It's a crappy experience in just about every way—digging through non-working links, getting spammed, the danger of malware hacks. We came up with a solution to this problem—a real can of Miller Lite with a real working TV antenna built in, so football watching can be fun and easy again. But getting it into the hands of the people who most need it required us to dive into their shady pirate world. That's how we came up with the idea for "Sunday Night is Back! (But Not For You)," a music video that appears to be a real working pirate stream of the opening NFL game, but turns out to be an absurdist cautionary tale and an offer for a free Cantenna from Miller Lite.

On the first Sunday Night of 2020 we anonymously flooded Reddit, Twitter and Google with links to our own carefully-faked streaming sites, just as illegal streaming sites promote themselves. Unsuspecting users found a seemingly real broadcast of the game, featuring what appeared to be a typical country-rock “Sunday Night Football” musical opener, much like the ones that have been introducing games for the past 30 years. But this song took users on a wild musical cautionary tale, detailing the terrible consequences of illegal football streaming—our hero ends up on a shady Russian website, his bank account gets hacked, his friends leave him, and the FBI takes him to federal prison. All of this, the song explains, could be avoided if he’d only used the Miller Lite Cantenna instead. A phone number provides the viewer a way to get one before it’s too late for them!

When it comes to football, Miller Lite is the underdog. The brand is outspent 4/1 in NFL contexts by category titan and league sponsor, Bud Light. To drive beer sales, we needed to earn an unfair share of attention in a way that connected back to what the brand stood for – Miller time – uninterrupted quality time with friends to drink beer and watch sports. COVID left fans without their go-to bars to watch the games. And our 21-34 year old, cable-cutting drinkers, were turning to illegal streaming sites to catch their favorite games. In fact, there were 362.7 million visits to sports piracy websites in January 2019 alone. With the brand being all about driving Miller Time, we set out to find a way to provide real utility – beer, sports, and friends – at a time when fans needed it most.

The film appears to be an actual pirated stream of a live NFL broadcast, starting like all Sunday Night games have for the past 30 years, with a country rock video celebrating the return of football. Most viewers ignore these cliche anthems, but this one is impossible to ignore. The singer begins addressing our felony-committing viewers directly, singing, "Sunday night is back... but not for you!" As his lecturing continues, we begin to follow the unsuspecting football fan in the video, who is torn from his stock imagery world into a downward spiral of illegal-streaming-consequences. He loses his friends. His identity is hacked. He gets sent to federal prison. To add insult to injury, his own lawyer (who we met in the ad at the beginning of the video) begins to lecture him, too. "You should've used the Cantenna!" It's too late for him, but not for our viewers.

+1 B Media Impressions

9.5 MM Views

+87k requested Cantennas

+9,915% brand interest lift during the campaign

+141% positive impressions for the brand among 21-34

+331% purchase consideration among 21+

9.2% Increase In Sales