Introducing Smirnoff Selfie.

To win tickets to the Ohakune Mardi Gras, we challenged 18-24 year olds to send us the selfie they thought had the most potential to become a bespoke Smirnoff cocktail. Smirnoff Selfie embraced and celebrated Millennials’ sense of self and combined it with novel and unexpected use of a social media platform they often use, but had not experienced in that way before.

Creatively, it ticked all the boxes for our target demographic and delivered the sort of experience they both seek out and actively choose to engage with. And by doing so, we reestablished Smirnoff’s brand credentials and relevance with this picky and often fickle audience.

It was early 2016 and Facebook had just launched Livestream. Although video was causing a massive shift in social media, no brands were really leveraging Facebook’s new offering. The reason was simple; you had to shoot using your smartphone. For a brand, that meant a really poor experience. But we saw the potential. And so we set our Dev team a task. Hack the Livestream API. After many hours and an undisclosed number of pizzas, they did. This meant we could plug in a full editing desk into Livestream, which meant multiple cameras, high quality audio, and on-screen supers.

With the tech sorted we went live to our facebook fans. One host. One amazing mixologist (who had never seen the selfies before). One bar fully stacked with all sorts of goodies. And lots of fingers crossed because we had no idea what we were going to get.

We saw massive engagement through our Smirnoff Selfie campaign. Not only did a huge audience tune in to see if their selfie had been shortlisted, but viewers and fans could directly interact with our Host and Mixologist, live. In terms of specific engagement metrics, we hit:

239,555 video views

451,000 total reach

2.8 million impressions

46,000+ direct interactions

Six brand new and bespoke Smirnoff cocktails

Overall this was a truly huge response when you consider that our prize was just four tickets to the Ohakune Mardi Gras (and we didn't even include flights and accomodation!).