The Bottle-O: driving brand salience over summer

The Christmas and summer season is a key retail moment for alcohol, and a crowded one. Australians come to it with the well established retailers already in mind, the ones known for convenience, choice and value, and in the lead-up to Christmas 2023 The Bottle-O had to be top of mind over them. It had to do that without giving up its value-driven image, and while shopper preferences moved toward more premium products.

Cocktails on Daily Mail, backyard cricket on Junkee and The Sporting News Network

The job was to put the brand inside the festive and summer moments Australians were reading about anyway, in the publisher’s own voice, then amplify that content across META, YouTube and TikTok.

Daily Mail ran two shoppable guides. Christmas Cocktails carried recipes for easy to make Christmas cocktails, with hyperlinks to The Bottle-O products through the article so a reader could buy what the recipe called for. Sleigh your Christmas Prep covered the time saving essentials of festive party prep, from pre-mixing cocktails to drinks with festive flavours, leaning into The Bottle-O’s easy going value proposition.

Junkee ran an article, two videos and interactive polls. Twelve Drinks Of Christmas was a guide to drinks for the occasions the season is made of, from decorating the tree to dinner with the in-laws, in the relatable tone of Junkee’s own editorial.

Its Friendmas Do’s & Don’ts video ran the important dos and the funny don’ts of Friendmas, with the people in it drinking their favourites from The Bottle-O. Its Backyard Cricket video was the Junkee team playing backyard cricket and drinking The Bottle-O to celebrate the season.

Junkee also ran interactive polls on Instagram Stories, asking followers to vote on the most iconic moments in the Aussie Christmas calendar. They were structured like Junkee’s organic posts, so they read as part of the feed rather than an ad in it.

The Sporting News Network brought in a professional. Its video starred cricket pro Chris Green giving tips on how to excel at backyard cricket, in an interview format with fun footage, voiceovers and festive music, The Bottle-O logo and colours woven through it. A companion article summarised the tips, carried the video, and pointed readers to The Bottle-O’s website.

The Daily Mail articles alone held 101 days of attention

That is time an intrusive ad format cannot buy, which is why the work ran long and immersive.

The Sporting News Network article generated 10 days’ worth of brand engagement on the same measure. Its video with Chris Green achieved a view-through rate of over 66%. View times for both the written and the video work ran past publisher benchmarks.

The work that leaned on nostalgia carried the social engagement. The work that leaned on nostalgia, backyard cricket above all, carried the social engagement.

The publishers wrote The Bottle-O into their readers’ summer.

Daily Mail, Junkee and The Sporting News Network wrote the summer their readers recognise, the cocktails, the in-laws, the backyard cricket, and The Bottle-O was in it, in the publisher’s voice rather than its own.

This was the 2023 festive season, counted in attention time and social engagement. Nobody counted a sale, and nothing here says a shopper changed where they buy.