United Breweries Ltd-Kingfisher Calendar 2010 Launch Contest

India Social Case Challenge – Edition 1

Category- Long-term Initiatives

Title-Kingfisher Calendar 2010 Launch Contest

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Kingfisher Beer from the house of United Breweries Ltd. It is the largest selling beer brand in the country.

Executive Summary

As a part of Kingfisher’s basic proposition of spreading the cheer of the Good Times to everyone, there was an activity to mark the launch of India’ ’s hottest glamour product, the Kingfisher Calendar 2010, involving our loyal consumers & fans who stood a chance to get an entry to this exclusive event. The means to go about this exercise was pitting aspirants against each other through a dedicated website and a tight integration with social media resulting in viral sharing of content related to the activity, emanating mostly from the contestants & their followers. This created a huge buzz in the online space and received an unexpectedly high response. The initiative was also lauded by keen followers and practitioners on the digital medium.

Background
The Kingfisher Calendar is without any doubt amongst the top most fashion and glamor products from India. It is also extremely exclusive in terms of being available to only a select few. This lends a huge element of desirability around the product itself. The launch event of the Calendar is one of the most anticipated and widely covered fashion/ glamour events in India. In the past it has been launched by celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Deepika Padukone and generates a huge buzz on all media, owing to the mass appeal & desirability attached to it.Weeks before the actual launch, there is a lot of curiosity around the new calendar.

Approach/ Strategy
We wanted to spread the message that Kingfisher is living up to its brand promise and giving 2 people a chance to live the Good Times by attending the most sought after & exclusive event – the launch of the Kingfisher Calendar 2010. Rather than going the conventional route of opting to resort to digital display advertising only to promote the event
while also driving home the exclusivity around it, we decided to maximize the noise that we create by appointing champions for the cause (contestants) who can compete against each other in a nationwide open competition.

Also, these champions would make the noise on our behalf by demanding votes through their own social profiles, leading friends/ followers to their respective profiles on the contest microsite. A key strategy for viral amplification was keeping the voting process open for visitors to come back daily & vote once for each candidate of their preference. We tightly wove all social media channels into the whole amplification process.

The internally stated objective (in terms of no’s) initially was to get 1000 registrations and approximately 8000 votes. We allocated a total budget of Rs. 8 lakhs which was supposed to take care of promotions on social media, display ads & SEM. The contest and its campaign ran for a period of 2 weeks, between December 3, 2009 and December 16, 2009.

Stakeholders
The primary stakeholders in the campaign were consumers of Kingfisher and fans of the Kingfisher Calendar, who could have no other way of getting a chance to attend an extremely exclusive event like the Kingfisher Calendar launch. The secondary stakeholders (this set was supposed to drive the real numbers for us) were the friends & social media followers of the contestants who would come and vote for the contestants and in turn pass on the information to their followers, hence creating a viral impact.

The initiative was received in an extremely positive manner by both these sets, as is evident from the phenomenal buzz created on all the channels we promoted the contest on as well as the participation statistics.

About the initiative

The flow of the activity went like this – The contest was positioned & promoted as ‘The Hottest Job in Town’, basically assigning the responsibility of covering the launch of the Kingfisher Calendar on social media for Kingfisher. A microsite was created for the contest where any user could create his/ her own profile with the following fields: Name, Gender, City, DOB, Facebook profile link, Orkut profile link, Twitter Profile link, Blog feed links and links to any other social profiles like Flickr, Picasa, etc. Apart from this, they were asked 2 questions: “Why do you think should you be chosen to cover the Kingfisher Calendar 2010 launch?” & “What can you do to win a Kingfisher Calendar?” Once they submitted this information, we automatically generated a profile based on this information which had a unique
URL. The contestants then had the option to share it through their social profiles.

Following this, the contestants were supposed to garner votes for themselves, with the clear instruction that they could get any individual to vote for them once daily during the duration of the campaign. The voters could do so only after opting in through Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth or Google Friend Connect. Allowing 3 modes of authorization meant each voter could technically vote 3 times for one contestant every day, once through each mode.

Once the vote got submitted, the voter had an option to share it on their social profiles as well, hence causing a multiplier effect from a reach standpoint. In the end, the votes and overall profiles would have determined the winners. This led to a lot of canvassing by candidates, their friends and family. Numerous tweets, Facebook posts & blog mentions were made about the contest. Some contestants even added their contest profile page link as s Facebook status messages and as the signature in their blogs & emails.

From our end, we promoted the contest extensively on Twitter & Facebook through our strong presence, communicating contest details, status, deadlines, prizes, etc. while also engaging people in general conversation around the Calendar.

Impact – Outcome
The contest received a phenomenal response, much higher than what we had expected. In number terms, the following was the performance:
a. Total Registrations s/ Profiles Created: 2,027
b. Total Votes Polled: : 17,869
c. Votes obtained by 2 winners: 3,080 & 2,902
d. Contest page PVs: 33,15,594
e. Contest page UUs: 1,08,828
f. Tweets for the contest: 4860
g. Average CTR for display ads: 0.66%

These numbers were obtained through Google Analytics on our website, manual counting of tweets and 3rd party ad server numbers. These numbers were far above what we had expected for the campaign. In terms of buzz, the response was phenomenal. From people sending tweets & retweeting to canvass for themselves/ their friends to blog posts around the calendar, contest profile link in blog/email signature, Facebook and Orkut updates with contestant details and profile link etc, we created phenomenal buzz during the campaign and till about 2 weeks after the actual launch of the Kingfisher Calendar.

A major part of this buzz was driven by our 2 winners in tandem with our dedicated team. We introduced the hashtag #KFCal2010 for the launch event and all the tweets for the event were sent with this tag. The 2 winners, who attended the event, kept on Tweeting, Twitpicking, making Facebook & Orkut updates and Flickr uploads all through
the launch period and even a few weeks post the event. We made sure to retweet/ pass on the same updates to our social media fan base.

Learnings

Though the campaign was immensely successful, there were quite a few learnings that we could incorporate in similar future campaigns:
a. Create pre-campaign noise using social media. Since an event like the Calendar launch is already a pretty anticipated one. This might help in delivering good numbers right from the start of the contest, rather than building up steam after the first few days.
b. Pull in more content from social media profiles like Facebook, Twitteer, Flickr onto the contest profile so that voters get a better picture of the participants and can then vote accordingly.
c. To increase the interactivity on the contest site, we will enable users to leave comments on participant profiles.
d. The final selection of the winners could be done in a few different ways. We have certain iterations that we are exploring for the next year in order to ensure the voters of the top 50-100 guys to keep coming back daily to vote.

What next
The contest and campaign now stands successfully closed. Since the Kingfisher Calendar is an annual event, we are considering making this contest an annual one but improving it using the learnings listed above and incorporating any future changes in the social media landscape which will enhance the campaign.

Reasoning

What we set out to achieve (and eventually achieved way beyond our expectations) was to have a seamless integration of our contest with different social media channels in order to maximize the impact of the launch event while heightening the existing degree of desirability attached to the event. The e-participants did not need to “sign up” with our website to either create a profile or vote in the contest. A large part of the credit of the success of the campaign
goes to the social media push that it received from the participants themselves.

We eventually achieved a a superb mix of participants in terms of backgrounds, geographies, social media affiliations and age-groups. Also, the positive word-of-mouth that the contest generated has been extremely encouraging and reassures us that the activity has achieved the desired results.

Credits Strategy

Digital Marketing Team, United Breweries Ltd. (Kingfisher)

Credits Execution

Digital Marketing Team, United Breweries Ltd. (Kingfisher) ) & Netbiz Systems Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai

Testimonials
a. http://twitter.com/ /santoshp/status/6994747947 -“@kingfisherworldd KF CAL contest was very nicely implemented, easily say that’s its one of the best campaigns I’ve seen on social media”

b. http://twitter.com/ /dhempe/status/6995319624 -“Agrd! RRT @santoshp: @kingfisherworld KKF CAL contest very nicely implemented, one of the best campaigns I’ve seen on social media”

c.http://twitter.com/ /Gauravonomics/statuses/6564719480 -“Voted for @naina at the @kingfisherworld Calender Launch Contest http://bit.ly/64OEvd Good integration with Facebook, Twitter & & Google IDs.”

d.http://www.shahpriya.com/blog/2010/01/indian-brands-that-get-twitter/ -“… and held a contest for the sexy Kingfisher Calendar launch. Most important, it has stuck to its core brand value: King of good times.”

e. http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/maya-campaigns-for-naina-in-the-kingfishercalendar-launch-contest/

Factsheet

Name of the company: United Breweries Ltd. (Kingfisher Beer)

Number of Employees: 1000-5000
Category: Brand
Case submitted by: Aditya Pawan, Product Manager Digital Marketing
Website: http://www.kingfisherworld.com