The Campaign

Finding love in today's world is tough. Finding love in today's world if you're a hipster is ridiculously tough. Hipsters have very specific and unusual tastes (like vintage vinyl from ex-Soviet countries, chia seed cupcakes, sustainably-sourced beard oil... you get the picture), and finding a partner with the same passions can be very difficult. We wanted to help hipsters connect with one other. We wanted to show that we understood what it means to be non-mainstream. And most of all, we wanted to help people who play the ukelele to find love. So we created Tinster - the world's first dating app designed specially for hipsters. Well, sort of. We shot a parody film, spoofing the archetypal Kickstarter promo video. The video proudly announced the release of Tinster. Except, we never actually built the app. And the funny thing is, it didn't really matter...

The Brief

The overall budget was roughly USD 8,800. This includes production, media and agency fees. Roughly USD 1,500 was spent to promote posts on Facebook. The rest was invested in producing all of the campaign's executions, including the video, the website and community management.

Creative Execution

On January 18th, 2016, the video went live on YouTube and was promoted on Facebook via the Magners Asia Facebook page. The video was also promoted by key opinion leaders, including SMRT Feedback (a famous Singaporean humour group), bloggers and by multiple publications in Singapore and beyond. At the end of the video, users were directed to a website, www.tinster.co, where they could sign up for a 'beta test'. When users logged onto the site, they took part in a simple test, whereby they filled in their personal details and selected from a list of typically-hipster interests. On the back-end, every time a male and a female with similar interests signed up, they were matched together. On January 28th, the beta test closed, and 5 lucky couples won blind dates to Laneway, with tickets courtesy of Magners.

Results

With a budget of less than USD 10,000, and in a period of just 11 days: We accumulated 82,000,000 impressions. Some of those impressions include: 495,000 views with a 14% click-through rate on our promoted Facebook post; 103,000 views across Laneway Festival's social media feeds; over 160,000 on Instagram via multiple media outlets that picked up the video organically; and 800 tweets and 1,750 articles and mentions in Singapore and beyond. Our campaign had a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of 10 cents, with the industry average for a typical video ad at about USD 2.50. We generated approximately USD 350,000 in PR value. At the Laneway music festival, we sold 600 bottles of Magners cider per hour, exceeding our initial target of selling 2,880 bottles by 45 % (total bottles sold: 4,200).

The Tinster campaign was created to establish a relationship with an entirely new demographic for Magners cider, by inviting them to interact with the brand and its unique style of humor. This was achieved through a series of activities online, on social media, and on ground, all of which were aimed at fostering long-term engagement, while encouraging our target audience to take direct action (ie. by participating in our Laneway Festival activities). Via the campaign, we released content across online channels that allowed our audience to interact with the brand and experience Magners' humorous and unconventional identity.

Our target audience is a sub-category of the Millennial demographic. These are individuals aged in their early 20s to mid 30s. What defines a hipster is a subject of debate, but the overarching characteristic that unites all hipsters is their passion for things that are non-mainstream. Right away we knew a big-budget 360 campaign was not the way to go (and besides, we didn't have the money...). Instead, we had to lure people in with interesting, shareable content, then leverage our partnership with Laneway Festival to incentivise them to take action. Our choice of channels was precise: we used Facebook, primarily through a partnership with a key influencer that catered to a millennial audience. Laneway further spread our content via Instagram and Twitter. This ensured accurate targeting with media channels that suited the content.