The idea - “Everyone can make a mixed drink.”

We developed a platform that met our audience’s desire for easy to make mixed drinks. We only chose drink recipes with minimal ingredients and limited steps. To emphasize how easily they could be made, all our recipes were shot as 15s videos, GIFs, and images.These were then delivered weekly to our audience through our Smirnoff social channels.

The media strategy – a social publishing model connected to sales cycles

After looking into our data insights, it was clear that to meet our commercial, consumer and communications goals, we needed to adopt an always on social publishing model that posted our drinks each week on a Thursday / Friday, in order to impact the purchase decision for that weekend.

The content – commercially driven recipes connected to cultural conversation

We knew which flavors of vodka sold in which seasons, so we created easy to make drinks recipes that we knew would inspire our audience, but that wasn’t enough to cut through. To attach our recipes to the things people actually cared about, we monitored social conversation around specific topics and created drinks around those themes for both planned moments (St. Patrick’s Day) and unplanned moments (same-sex marriage ruling).

24x Category Growth

The growth of supported Smirnoff flavors was 24x that of category growth in value during the same period (+10.8% vs. 0.5%). Media modeling also showed that social delivered more Smirnoff sales per dollar than TV, further validating social publishing as a winning strategy.

Industry leading social metrics

The Smirnoff Drinks Engine delivered industry leading social metrics with engagement and media efficiency exceeding all spirits, indicating that the social activity was responsible for delivering increased sales.

Engagement Rate

Facebook: 8.47% vs. 4.31% (industry norm)

Instagram: 7.25% vs. 3.3%

Twitter: 2.42% vs. 1.69%

Media Efficiency

Facebook CPM: $4.37 vs. $4.68 (industry norm)

Instagram CPM: $4.57 vs. $5.11

Twitter CPV: $0.10 vs. $0.15

In addition, our audience base increased significantly across all social channels YOY, demonstrating the consumer impact of the campaign.

Channel Growth

Facebook: +4.8%

Twitter: +29%

Instagram: +594%