The Campaign

We were inspired by the insight into our football fan target audience – they were the ultimate tribes, united behind their favorite team and attracted to everything that enabled them to show off their allegiance. Armed with this insight, we decided to not just create one limited-edition design, but an entire series revolving around eight (a lucky number) of China’s favorite teams. We grounded our core design idea in the iconic Budweiser logo, dissecting it until it became a powerfully simple bowtie graphic. From this, we brought to life FIFA World Cup’s euphoric energy as striking light beams emanating from the Bud bowtie, transforming into the dominant flag colors of the eight selected teams.

Creative Execution

The outcome was a series of incredibly simple interpretation of the countries’ flags, delivered boldly in a design style that was distinctively Budweiser. What was originally a limited-edition bottle design brief quickly grew into a campaign visual identity task. We took the design thinking and transformed it into a stand-out campaign visual identity system that was used in nationwide communications in 270 cities, across 200,000 touch points, giving Budweiser an instantly recognizable look amongst the super saturated FIFA World Cup season.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The limited-edition bottle series were so popular that immediately after launch, the unexpected high demand sent suppliers scrambling to restock. In the first week of launch, all 3.8 million bottles produced were already swept up by China’s avid football tribes.