For the first time ever, Budweiser was brewing all of its beer in the United States with wind power. However, many companies have been using wind power in their production facilities for years. So the brief was to find a compelling and innovative way to tell the story of Budweiser’s commitment to sustainability. Our objective was to announce this initiative in a way that would make consumers care about something that, at face value, is not incredibly exciting. So that got us thinking: if the wind can be used to brew beer, can it also be used to tell people that Budweiser is brewed by the wind? We passed on traditional media planners and set out to create the world’s first-ever radio campaign controlled entirely by wind power.

The idea was simple: if the wind was now brewing our beer, why not let it control our advertising? We noticed that wind patterns across America are constantly changing and saw an opportunity to use data to spread our important message in a creative way. So we became the first brand ever to use real time weather data to determine where and when our radio ads would air. With every change in direction or speed of the wind, we would write new scripts and adjust our media buy to reflect the change.

Budweiser leveraged real time weather data to bring this concept to life. Using the National Digital Forecast Database, part of The National Weather Service’s (NWS’s) open-source database, Budweiser tracked wind patterns across America over a four day span. Each time the wind shifted course or picked up speed, we would track its path to determine where our ad would run next and who we were targeting. We wrote custom scripts for each city along the way in order to create a unique message based on the actual journey the wind was taking. Once we had the path mapped out, we then bought the corresponding radio ad units across the country to follow it.

Simply put, without real-time weather data this campaign would not exist. Our plan was to launch the first ever campaign where the wind was in charge of our media plan. We launched on Earth Day in Billings, OK – the home of Budweiser’s wind turbine farm, Thunder Ranch. From there, our ads traveled through major urban centers like Oklahoma City to rural towns like Lake Ozark all the way to the Canadian border. With every new market the wind took us to, we wrote custom scripts tailored to that specific town, making sure the creative was as impactful and relevant as possible. For example, when the wind circled Abbotsford, Wisconsin for hours, we ran a custom ad four different times. Or in Jefferson City, Missouri, our ad mentioned the river that runs through the city and the speed at which the wind was moving. The beauty of this campaign

The wind took our ad on a journey over the course of 96 hours that covered 24 towns, 5 states, and over 1,300 miles across the United States. In total, Budweiser’s message reached 1.5 million people along the route. Over the course of the campaign, we wrote 26 unique scripts tailored to each location, making our message more impactful to people hearing it for the first time and creating a more enhanced consumer experience. Although Budweiser’s message spread along a very specific route across middle America, industry publications covered the campaign for its innovative use of data and helped spread the word that the wind isn’t just good at brewing beer, it’s good at advertising, too. In the end, we were able to spread Budweiser’s most important message in an interesting way, and help people better understand how big our shift to renewable electricity really was.