How Guinness became the Australian beer of winter
Winning The Drum Awards for Marketing APAC’s Out of home Gold is The Guinness Brewery of Meteorology from Vistar Media. Here is the award-winning case study.
Example of award-winning work
Objectives
In 2023, Guinness aimed to solidify itself as the Australian beer of winter. Understanding that summer is the most important selling period for beer brands in Australia, and the beers enjoyed most are crisp, easy-drinking, light-colored lagers served in clear bottles, Guinness’ dark, opaque, and seemingly heavy ale was the perfect go-to beverage for winter. On a cold, windy mid-July evening, people are bound to crave drinks that comfort.
The “Guinness Brewery of Meteorology” campaign strategy focused on leveraging the connection between the optimal temperature for a Guinness and winter temperatures in Australia.
The challenge was to find a new occasion when Aussies would reach for a pint of Guinness, presenting a clear opportunity to conceive winter Guinness season – showing that when the temperature drops, it’s a lovely time for a Guinness.
Guinness sought innovative ways to drive sales and become synonymous with the idea of winter. The campaign utilized the technological smarts of media agency UM, performance agency Kinesso, and programmatic out-of-home (OOH) technology leader Vistar Media, to build a targeted DOOH campaign during the winter months targeting males over 18 years old who were within close proximity to pubs serving Guinness.
The primary objective was to increase visit uplift, driving the sale of Guinness.
Strategy
With the target audience being males aged 18+, Guinness needed accuracy in delivering the creative and campaign. As winter weather can be unpredictable, Guinness needed to use a channel that could react at the pace of Aussie weather conditions, hence the innovative use of programmatic OOH. They ran a weather-triggered DOOH campaign that activated when the temperature fell below 15 degrees Celsius, displaying the Guinness creative across relevant DOOH screens.
This campaign ran through the Australian winter months from June 9th to August 27th, appearing in the Greater Metro Areas of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.
Specific positioning of the OOH creative and weather triggers were key to the campaign’s effectiveness. UM and Vistar Media identified and programmatically activated small format outdoor screens within 1km of target destinations - pubs serving Guinness. This ensured contextual relevance and efficiency as the ads were served when and where the target audience was most likely to be making a purchasing decision.
With over 21 creative variations across the four cities, the messaging was tailored to maximize the campaign’s relevance to Guinness drinkers. The agility and responsiveness of programmatic OOH allowed a swift response to different weather patterns, ensuring Guinness was there at the right moment, in the right locations, using weather triggers to go live.
Creatively, the campaign leveraged QR codes to establish a redeemable component, enabling users to register for a free pint of Guinness by scanning the QR code. This was further aided by a high-level creative strategy that used video over static, and regularly swapped out creatives to keep the campaign fresh.
Creating a measurement methodology to understand programmatic DOOH exposure to conversion was crucial. Through Lifesight, UM, Kinesso, and Vistar Media accurately generated and measured the campaign results using visit uplift (footfall attribution). This involved three stages: tracking, conversion, and reporting.
Weekly DOOH impression logs were shared with Lifesight to create exposed device mapping. This anonymized data was tracked through the campaign and attribution window. Lifesight “MAIDs” were mapped to a DOOH exposure based on proximity to the DOOH placement and time stamps.
The next step was understanding conversion, where target destinations were monitored for visits from devices exposed to the DOOH campaign. Lifesight attributes store visits with a 95%+ visit confidence.
Finally, Lifesight presented the data in real-time through offline attribution reports.
Results
For Guinness and the wider Lion group, this OOH experience demonstrated and proved the measurement capabilities of OOH as a channel capable of driving full funnel results – from awareness to conversion and loyalty.
The use of weather triggers, QR code creatives, audience targeting (males 18+), and point of interest targeting successfully increased engagement and drove consumption of Guinness across the brand’s target markets.
The campaign reached 2.1 million unique users and saw 5,399,372 impressions across the five metro capital cities, driving an incredible 1.2 million pub visitations. This created a visit uplift of 14.7%, determined by comparing the normalised visit rate of the exposed group with a non-exposed control group.
Guinness successfully reached their target audience of males 18+, with 69.52% of exposed visitors being male and 30.48% female. Of these, 46.5% were aged 18-24 and 17.01% were 35-44.
While this was part of a larger omnichannel campaign, it accelerated consumption growth in winter by +13% (litres) YoY during the key winter months, equating to 100,000 incremental pints consumed. The campaign also drove an +18% increase in revenue YoY.
The results demonstrate the OOH business case for food and beverage brands looking to get closer to their consumers. By leveraging the technology and data embedded in OOH, Guinness grew reach and awareness through audience and point of interest targeting, as well as using QR codes and weather triggers to drive conversion. This campaign is a brilliant example of OOH’s growing ability to combine creative, technology, data, and measurement to deploy and measure ads that impact consumers and a brand’s bottom line.
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