Mike’s Hard Lemonade invented the flavored malt beverage category more than 20 years ago but had lost much of its cultural relevance. Now they needed to introduce a new hard seltzer product in a marketplace saturated with over 300 seltzer brands and 1500 SKUs. And this needed to be done in the most memorable way possible bringing attention to this being a new lemonade seltzer from Mike’s.

In a category that’s dominated by the big brewers and has been inundated by almost every type of beverage company, we needed a campaign that made it impossible to miss that Mike's Hard Lemonade now made a seltzer. And since the creative bar is so high in the malt beverage/seltzer category, we needed a campaign that would not only break through, but bring some cultural cache to the Mike's brand. To do this we enlisted the most famous Mike, Mike Tyson, and created a campaign construct that cleverly has everyone saying that the new, crisp and refreshing hard lemonade seltzer was Mike's.

We knew a celebrity partner could add instant impact to the new product launch in a very crowded category. But the celeb needed to be a good fit. It needed to be someone who resonated with the audience. Someone with a big name. But more importantly, the right name. And that name was Mike. What better fit than the world's most famous Mike (Mike Tyson) talking about a drink called 'Mike's'? That's a very good fit. But Mike couldn't just speak to the camera and say "Drink Mike's." He needed to do something more unexpected to build up the impact of the introduction.

The seltzer category spends over $600MM in media annually and Mike's only planned to spend 3% of that amount, so the creative and media needed to work hard to bring cultural relevance to the brand and win over the target consumer. To land the news that Mike's Hard Lemonade now had a crisp and refreshing hard lemonade seltzer, we developed a construct where a simple misunderstanding turned into comic relief while playing off Mike Tyson's notorious reputation as one of the heaviest hitters in boxing history. Over the course of one shooting day, we filmed Iron Mike in several different set-ups, allowing us to create two separate 30-second ads and 15-second cutdown versions. The first of which premiered during the live broadcast of the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards and the season finale of The Bachelor, causing quite a stir and eliciting very positive social media chatter about the Mike-Mike's collaboration.

The combination of effective creative and a reach based media plan led to powerful results for the inaugural year of Mike’s Hard Lemonade Seltzer.

-#8 Hard Seltzer brand, not just hard lemonade seltzer brand.

-Achieved awareness levels of 51%, exceeding the goal of 44%.

-80% of Mike's Hard Lemonade Seltzer sales were incremental to the Mike's portfolio.

-Higher repeat purchase rate than Bud Light Seltzer and on par with Truly Lemonade.

-#15 Hard Seltzer 12PK sold out of 175+ other SKUs