Lifting the lid on STōK Cold Brew Coffee’s & Hershey’s winning advertising strategies

Humor helps audiences swallow a bold, unconventional strategy

STōK Cold Brew Coffee’s new sponsorship of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s Wrexham FC soccer team is not an immediately obvious collaboration. It’s a US-based partnership in a UK market where cold brew isn’t ‘a thing’. Agency Harvest Creative’s campaign strategy tapped into this sense of a weird connection to communicate the brand cleverly in a series of humorous ads, including one where the Wrexham team’s tea is substituted for cold brew coffee, resulting in public ‘mockery’ of the brand.

The risky, disruptive and light-hearted approach created a huge buzz around the brand. Then, when media coverage and online chat was at its highest, consumers’ digital and social channels were flooded with integrated, storytelling content. This drove social activations, organic growth and product trial, resulting in 14+ billion impressions, an incremental $5m in sales and a doubling of household penetration – all in a declining category. It’s little wonder Harvest Creative grabbed both Advertising and Creative Gold for the campaign.

Understand consumers to lean into their cultural moments

The Drum Marketing Awards Americas are about rewarding brands and marketing teams that really understand their customers in a way that focuses on business outcomes, not just marketing outputs.

And understanding the customer, plus leveraging a natural connection between them and the brand’s personality, is key to successfully riding a cultural wave. STōK Cold Brew Coffee clearly did that well by humorously tapping into Wrexham’s popular, rags-to-riches story, in a way which delighted the fans. Meanwhile, the winner of Kantar's AI Creative Effectiveness Award, Reese’s Caramel Big Cups, is also a great example of a brand successfully understanding its audiences as fans, to adopt a bold strategy which leaned into a cultural moment.

Working with its agency Erich and Kallman, the number one candy brand in the US announced that it was changing its top selling Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups by adding in a layer of caramel, on the largest media platform in the world – the Super Bowl. And it bucked the category trend of the standard ‘bite and smile’ candy shot while doing so.

Erich and Kallman harnessed the intense love fans have for Reese’s and paired it with a concept rooted in the idea of change. The chaotic, energetic ad crammed in the exaggerated ‘yes!’ and ‘no!’ reactions of party goers to the news of the product change, in 30 seconds – from popcorn poured onto a Super Bowl watcher’s head to a grandma flying into a coffee table. The ad packed in so much action that viewers were compelled to go online and view it again, to find previously missed scenes – boosting social awareness and engagement.

Kantar’s LINK AI was used to assess the ad’s in-market success. The AI-enabled ad testing solution cross referenced its database of 250k+ tests, 10+ years of data, and 30m+ human interactions and concluded that the Reese’s Caramel Big Cups ad would drive the most consideration, purchase intent, awareness and impact in among a strong category of other US contenders.

For a behind the curtain look at more, successful brand strategies, visit The Drum Marketing Awards Americas page now.