Our client Baltika the biggest Russian brewery company decided to celebrate ?7 – Russia's most exported beer ever. The way Baltika thought to do it was to stress the international aspect of their beer.

It was a very ambitious goal because this country is not so worldly.

Our strategy was based on two main insights:

1. Most Russians don’t speak English properly

2. Russians love to drink

Based on a series of events in bars and restaurants, we created a PR campaign that originated an unprecedented buzz for the brand. ‘The Free Beer Challenge’ is the name of this very simple, fun and engaging series of events that used an otherwise pretty dull media (vending machine) in a new interactive way. Our audience was fascinated, amused and surprised and our project became the talk of the country for a few weeks.

We used a vending machine as a media channel to communicate the values of Baltika ?7. For one week we placed the machine in the most relevant venues for our target audience – bars and restaurants in urban context. This machine gave out free beer to all customers: all they needed to do is to ask for it in English. But the fun part was that they got exactly what they asked for. So if visitors made a mistake and asked for a \'be\ instead of a \'bir\, they got a bee toy instead. In order to cheer up the people who didn’t manage to get their Baltika N.7, we paired up with EF Education First language school and gave them a 15% discount on a course abroad to perfect their pronunciation.

People talked about us on social media, blogs, tv, on and offline press. In the first month, brand awareness grew by 12%, we were Top of Russia on YouTube for 2 weeks and Baltika enjoyed the project so much that ‘The Free Beer Challenge’ is now on tour all over Russia.