The biggest beer brand on Earth, AB-InBev has exclusive TV rights to the Super Bowl, which legally blocked us from advertising on "advertising's biggest night." Plus they had a budget of $50 million while we only had $250k.

Our goal was to get as much press as possible — but how do you get attention without the money, resources, or media buys as your competitors? You go to the one place your competitor's lawyers can't stop you — doing something no brand has ever done in the process — and get everyone talking.

The biggest beer brand on Earth blocked us from advertising in the Super Bowl. So we went to the one place their lawyers couldn’t stop us: The Metaverse. While there, we did some advertising firsts — like building the Metaverse’s first branded bar, where everything was interactive, from the bouncer checking IDs, to the toilet people flushed 40,000 times, to the tap that turned digital beer into actual Miller Lite in the real world.

It’s also where we premiered the first ever Super Bowl ad from the Metaverse — a spot that poked fun at everything from Super Bowl tropes, to the absurdity of the Metaverse itself.

The response was astounding. Our bar became the most attended branded event in Metaverse history. At peak, our traffic even crashed Decentraland’s servers. And while people spent 30 seconds watching AB InBev's TV ads, they spent 20 minutes inside our interactive experience.

As a light beer we can't sit out the Super Bowl - it's a big day for beer. So how do we get attention when we're blocked from advertising in the game, our competitor is outspending us by 200x, and every single brand is vying for eyeballs?

We have to find a way to steal a huge share of the conversation by doing something that had never been done and take advantage of a topic the press can't ignore.

By activating in the Metaverse, we captured the excitement of our 21-35 target who was already interacting with experiences there. The topicality of the Metaverse combined with the first-ever nature of the idea captured the interest of the press, and they spread it well beyond our target.

This project required us to execute many separate pieces: a custom-built 3D bar experience (The Meta Lite Bar) and a :50 3D animated spot, plus two separate limited edition wearable NFTs and Proof of Attendance token. We worked on all aspects simultaneously with multiple production companies, executing both in just 30 days (which 95% of vendors told us was impossible during our bidding process).

Nevertheless we persevered, and after successfully securing multiple plots of digital "land," our bar opened its doors in Decentraland from 2/7 - 2/15 with our spot launching on midnight of Super Bowl Sunday (2/13) and running through 2/15.

We chose Decentraland because it is the most accessible Metaverse world – easily reachable to anyone with a laptop and internet connection. We linked portals to our bar on our website and social, where just one click would take you there.

The response to our project was more than we could've hoped for. Our virtual bar experience became the most attended branded event in Metaverse history with over 154 days of total time spent inside our ad, with the average user spending a staggering 20 minutes there — crashing Decentraland’s servers under unprecedented traffic.

We got 1.7 Billion earned media impressions, becoming the most talked about beer brand during the Super Bowl. This translated to a +31.3pt increase in purchase consideration between 21-49 year olds (65% higher than average impact) and led to Miller Lite experiencing the largest sales growth of any light beer during the week of Super Bowl — a 7% total beer sales increase. Our greatest market share growth in the past five years.

But more importantly, we tapped into a completely new medium for Super Bowl ads, showing what's possible in this new digital frontier.