CASE STUDY: Bates 141 taps social media to generate hype for Ben & Jerry’s Chunk Fest 2010

Background

The Ben & Jerry's Chunk Fest is an annual event in Singapore that brings together music, ice cream and a fun day out.  The event typically relies on word of mouth and traditional advertising, but this year, three weeks prior to Chunk Fest, Ben & Jerry's challenged Bates 141 to amplify the attendance, solely leveraging on social media activities.

Strategy

Steering clear of ‘brand talk’, Bates 141 positioned Chunk Fest online as an eagerly anticipated event. Managing and tapping into a multi-platform social media community across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and targeted online conversations, they then mapped out where Ben & Jerry’s brand advocates existed to become brand ambassadors for Chunk Fest 2010.

Execution

To drive up the hype, Bates 141 used numerous social media tools including targeted ads on the brand advocate's Facebook pages, online chatter and redirected traffic from participating band's Facebook pages to the Chunk Fest’s site. The agency also posted fun leads on Facebook pages to enhance brand interaction and encourage users to spread the message virally on their own. 

Event hype was built through engaging Twitter feeds such as ‘Ice cream quote of the day’ and synced content feeds from ‘The great Moolah tour’.

Casual peer-to-peer conversations were seeded in 11 local interest and category-related forums, including Hungrygowhere.com, Hardwarezone.com and created event interest through informal conversations on these forums. Viral buzz and credible conservations were created with the input of key influencers on forums and social media.

The agency also integrated the off and online components of the campaign by incentivising consumers at the ice-cream shops to take pictures or video recordings that could be uploaded and tagged to Chunk Fest’s Facebook site.

During the event, live feeds on Twitter and Facebook were aimed at enticing potential last minute attendees, and a post-sharing component allowed users to tag the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook page. This enabled Bates 141 to sync fan page albums to Chunk Fest news feeds thus increasing the ice-cream company’s marketing reach.

Results

In three weeks, Bates 141 generated more than 800,000 impressions on Facebook profiles, over 6,000,000 social ad impressions and achieved sixth position on Yahoo Singapore’s search.