“Heating Up the S.Pellegrino Cooking Cup”

By associating itself with fine dining events, Italy’s S.Pellegrino brand had helped cultivate an international reputation and worldwide sales. Among its signature events is the S.Pellegrino Cooking Cup, a sailing regatta and culinary competition that combined Italian’s love of food and water in a manner ideally suited to the brand.

But as the client prepared to host its 12th Cooking Cup, it realized the wind was going out of the event’s sails. They wanted a new agency and a different tack. They needed a serious re-launch.

We quickly identified the problem and the opportunity. The international event was held in Venice, where few could witness the action. A lively cooking culture had sprung up online, but they had no knowledge of or reason to follow the event.

So we launched The S.Pellegrino Cooking Cup 2.0 and changed a few rules. Chefs would no longer choose their dishes. They would have to get creative with the items in our Mystery Basket, which we revealed to an international foodie community notorious for sharing their opinions online.

We not only welcomed food bloggers, we put them on the boat as active participants, an opportunity they couldn’t stop talking about.

And while the new online component was buzzing S.Pellegrino around the world, traditional media gave the event a fresh look. In the end we had doubled coverage over the previous year, and given S.Pellegrino thousands of new entries in the culinary conversation.

Hook the “foodies”

The agency introduced a wild card: the Mystery Basket. Previously, chefs had pre-determined what they would prepare, typically their signature dish. Our Mystery Basket leveled the playing field. The element of surprise hooked the foodie community, inviting them to the real-time reveal of the mystery ingredients online, then encouraging them to follow the chefs as they made their choices.

We put bloggers on the boats as part of the crew and rolled out the #cookingcup hashtag on Twitter, spurring our celebrity chefs and online media stars to bring their followers inside the story. The story came alive visually on Facebook where photos and recipes were posted, and online spectators were allowed to vote on the final dishes, creating a new award for the event.

We made sure rest of the world was well-represented, organizing a press trip with 200 international guests, including 40 journalists.

Now we’re being followed

By the event’s conclusion, the S.Pellegrino Cooking Cup 2.0 had more than doubled the press coverage over the previous year. Not only had Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media reached a new audience with 200,000 impressions in just four days, but traditional media had shown new interest as well, more than doubling the number of print and broadcast stories. More than 250 S.Pellegrino branded articles appeared to a readership of more than 300m in Italy, China, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Russia, Netherlands, Emirates, Israel and Sweden. The campaign generated an advertising value equivalency of nearly €2m and a ROI of 1,400%.