We couldn’t force our target’s interest in the brand, so we made up a story about the brand they would be interested in.

We used a mystery about a trailer park, an incident and a small northern town to get people engaging with a brand they didn’t know anything about and walking away with everything needed to know.

On TV and digital pre-roll we wrapped two 15-second product demos in the mystery of #TheSudburyIncident; an unexplained incident at a trailer park in Sudbury Canada that left people drinking their coffee rich and creamy.

Then we sent a journalist to Sudbury to investigate the made up incident, sharing his search on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. He became the community manager, sharing interviews, clues and engaged with elaborate user generated theories about what happened, like alien invasions, black holes and mining accidents.

After six months of content, and getting fictionally kicked out of Sudbury, we released a series of movie trailers on TV for ‘The Sudbury Incident: The Documentary’, our fictional journalist’s 3-minute Youtube documentary that finally answered the question everyone was asking: what the f*ck happened?

With a production budget under $300K we produced five 15-second spots, a 3-minute documentary and enough social content to last for six months.

Millennials couldn’t get enough. Our social channels blew up with questions, comments, user-generated content, theories and even parodies. The local newspaper came calling, and an article about the incident became “the most read story ever” in Strategy Magazine.

The campaign generated over 25 million social impressions with an average 18.3% view rate in social (83% higher than the CPG benchmark). Average post engagement was also 5.2x higher than benchmarks.

The campaign didn’t simply persuade millennials to engage in “revealing” the mystery – it got them to actually try the product. We saw an almost immediate increase in Coffee-mate Liquid sales.

Results showed we’d gained 2.7 share points, almost doubling the 1.5 benchmark, and a 20% increase in sales, 54% higher than the 13% benchmark and doubling category growth. In addition, we achieved a 24% lift in brand awareness among viewers, which was in the top 25% of CPG Canada studies.