Belvedere Vodka mobile-social effort results in 144M unique impressions

By Giselle Tsirulnik

April 15, 2011

Moët Hennessy-owned Belvedere Vodka developed a mobile-social program to drive purchases of its Belvedere Pure, Pink Grapefruit and U80 beverages in major cities nationwide.

The campaign ran in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington and Los Angeles. An advocate was chosen in each of these markets after meeting a stringent set of criteria, including their social media presence and influence in their respective market.
 
“The best way for us to engage our target, stay top of mind, particularly in nightlife environments, is through the use of mobile marketing,” said Tony Fair, senior brand manager for Belvedere Vodka at Moët Hennessy. 

“The social/mobile aspect of our program allowed our team to communicate with like minded individuals and the mobility allowed for real-time reporting," he said.

Alloy Access and its strategic partner one50one were called on by Belvedere to develop and execute this national influencer program

The ambassadors chosen to promote this initiative drove 144 million social media impressions via the custom mobile portals functionality alone. The mobile portal served as a tool for the ambassadors.

The ambassadors
The advocates chosen for this campaign were some of the top nightlife influencers in their particular cities. Because they were such great influencers they were expected to drive brand heat, relevance, and sales around the launches of Belvedere Pink Grapefruit, and Belvedere U80.

Custom API’s were built and integrated into a custom-built password protected mobile portal for content uploads, social messaging, hashtag management and program reporting. 



The Belvedere-branded portal for ambassadors

One50one built the mobile Web destination, which is accessible across all smartphone platforms, including iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices.

Upon signing into their market page, each influencer was able to access every component of the campaign, making it easy for them to successfully influence and activate against the program’s media and sales driven KPI’s

“We instituted very stringent criteria in the selection of each influencer,” said Troy Brown, president of One50one.

“Significant quantitative and qualitative due diligence was done on each influencer’s social media presence and their level of social capital, given we knew a custom mobile solution would be built to proliferate their social messaging around their brand activations,” he said.

Mobile’s role
According to Mr. Brown, mobile served as the central character in this program. The mobile portal served as a tool for the ambassadors. It was like one centralized tool for the ambassadors to manage their Belvedere social media outreach.

one50one built a mobile experience, with password protected market pages for the six markets. 

Upon signing in, each market page had a custom twitter feed specific to each influencer.

Each feed was built with a very strategic hashtag management and propagation tool.

Other features (for each individual market) included a one touch process to upload market specific photos and videos of each influencer’s market activations.

All social messaging activity was done from within the mobile portal. All daily reporting was entered directly into the mobile portal and download into custom spreadsheets to the brand team for easy viewing.

“Knowing the amount of time each influencer spent on their mobile device, we leveraged that over-indexing in the build out of its Belvedere-branded mobile portal, allowing each market influencer to complete all required activity in a central location,” Mr. Brown said.

Final take
Here is a video explaining the campaign fully