When this campaign was launched in September 2020, consumers had been living with pandemic restrictions for almost 6 months. Our young, adventurous, ambitious target consumers were stuck inside, their career aspirations put on hold and more. We saw this void in their lives and harnessed the trends of increased domestic travel, #VanLife and pandemic job loss to create a campaign and a CEO position that tapped into and delivered on all those trends, while also doing what our brand stands for – showcasing the joys of nature – in the process.

The idea was simple – create a job opportunity of a lifetime for our target consumers who were already craving the opportunity to get outdoors, living the van life and get paid to do it. It was a dream job for the aspirational 21–35-year-old, but as we soon found out, it was a dream job for anyone.

The problem here was two-fold. Consumers were jobless, stuck inside and craving the opportunity to get outdoors. We creates a program that allowed them to have all those things. Moreover, from a brand standpoint, Michelob ULTRA needed to grow its Pure Gold consumer base with more young, aspirational, career-oriented consumers who also loved nature. We needed more of them following us on social and we needed to grow our consumer data segment for Pure Gold for better targeting.

Technically our target audience is "21-35 premium co-ed beer / multicultural drinkers who are frequent drinkers of easy drinking premium lagers like Corona," but really, this program was built not only for them, but anyone who loves the outdoors, is interested in organic USDA-certified products and craves travel. These are all traits of the young 21–35-year-old consumer across the board.

Over the course of two weeks, we built a strong plan to ensure that everyone knew about the CEO position. We had a strong PR launch with key placements in travel-focused outlets like Travel+Leisure, Thrillist, Outside Magazine before hitting more than 300 local news stations across the country. Our media plan tapped into websites where young, aspirational travel enthusiasts frequented like Scott's Cheap Flights, Culture Trip and more. We also targeted social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest more heavily for this program as that was where folks were more inclined to consume travel-related content.

From a content standpoint, we thought it was important to showcase what the trip would be like. We showed the van, a map of the proposed route and most importantly we teamed up with the U.S. National Parks Foundation to give the campaign credibility and access to the country's most beautiful places.

People knew that they had to go above and beyond to get our attention, so they created websites, sent emails to our CMO, made Tiktok and YouTube videos and more. In the end, the Pure Gold CEO was the most-applied-for position in the history of Anheuser-Busch with more than 100,000 applicants. It helped Michelob ULTRA gain a staggering nearly 20,000 Instagram followers organically over the course of just two weeks. It also built an entire army of consumers who shared beautiful nature content with our product at the center through the application process.

-Over 152,000 social mentions generated as a result of the campaign

-More than 548 million PR impressions

-A 17K spike in organic follower growth on Instagram over a two-week period

-597K visits to MichelobULTRA.com during the campaign – a 1468% increase in website traffic

-350K consumer data points collected as a result of the campaign