The Campaign

The media environment is more cluttered than ever before. In Australia, football is the most highly sponsored sport and was dominated by Bundaberg Rum’s competitors. Because of this, Bundaberg was finding it hard to cut through the chaos and form a meaningful connection with young men in the arena of football. The objective of the campaign was to form a strong bond between Bundaberg Rum, young men, and football. As well as to have Bundaberg become a brand that young men love, because it supports football and its fans. Our solution was to go where no media exists. So we went to young men’s dreams; which are a vault of virgin media. To properly access this unchartered space we created content that young men would love and winningly participate in. The result was Footy Dreams—a series of branded podcasts to be listened to by young men as they fell sleep.

Success of the Campaign

Footy Dreams infiltrated the dreams of 53,000 young men. The series gave Bundaberg Rum access to over $1,000,000 of untapped virgin media, every single night. During the time Footy Dreams ran, Bundaberg’s overall sales increased by 6%. The response of the audience was outstanding—they shared about their new dreams on facebook and twitter, YouTube and tumblr. Beyond stats, Footy Dreams was successful with Bundaberg Rum because when Bundaberg could not cut through the chaos of sponsored football, Footy Dreams enabled them to completely sidestep all known media channels and become the only brand that exists in people’s dreams—a vault of virgin media. This is something that no brand, in any arena, has ever done before. The campaign was successful with consumers because it tapped into their boyhood dreams and let them relive the those dreams once again.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

First we went to some of Australia’s biggest football stars (our audience’s childhood heroes) and recorded their most epic football stories. The stories were turned into a series of branded podcasts, and uploaded to a purpose-built micro site, as well as itunes and the app store. We then created an informercial, which ran online, and drove young men to the micro site, itunes and the app store, where they downloaded the podcasts for free. They then put the mp3s on their ipods, listened to them as they fell asleep, and dreamed of football stardom and Bundaberg Rum.