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April 8, 2002 - Strategy Magazine
Best Media Plan

Winner... best plan for a budget of less than $1 million
Building the Bud Light Institute (without actually building it)

Agency/media company*

Labatt Media Group/

Downtown Partners

Client

Labatt Breweries of Canada

Brand

Bud Light

Media budget

$86,000

Media used

Out-of-Home

(glass-mounted wall mural)

Newspaper

Internet

Event

Timing

June through July, 2001

Media team

John Verdon, brand manager, Bud Light, Labatt Breweries of Canada

Ron Christie, group media manager, PJDDB Downtown (now at Labatt Media Group)

Tim Binkley, account director, PJDDB Downtown

David Chiavegato, creative

director, PJDDB Downtown

(now at Grip)

Rich Pryce-Jones, creative director, PJDDB Downtown (now at Grip)

The background

The plan's objective was to bring the Bud Light Institute to life - and with it, all of the brand's attributes (guy fun, humorous, masculine, ironic).

Within this objective was the underlying requirement to provide the Bud Light Institute with a sense of physical presence in Toronto, thus reinforcing the brand's presence in the Canadian marketplace, without actually having to construct or rent a building, much less staff a real institute.

A limited budget for this tactical plan required multiple executions that combined for a larger than life impact through exploitable talk value and PR opportunities.

The plan

Physical presence

With condominium construction in Toronto at its zenith in the spring and summer of 2001, the physical execution for the Bud Light Institute was as apparent as the "Coming Soon - Waterpark Condos" signs that dotted the landscape.

Standing out amidst the clutter of real construction signs presented a problem that was solved by the arrival of glass-mounted mural capabilities in the marketplace. The result was a 5,000-square-foot poster at the corner of Eglinton and Duplex that, at the time, was the first and only glass-mounted mural in the city's core.

The creative towered six stories above the Eglinton/Duplex intersection, featuring an ominous "Coming Soon" notice over a graphic depicting the institute as a Metropolis-inspired monolith dedicated to the promotion of guy's fun. Area residents were seen to clamber out of their cars for a better look at what threatened to be the respectable neighbourhood's worst nightmare.

Staffing

A desire to represent the Bud Light Institute as a tangible, semi-functional entity was handled in a fairly straightforward manner: employment ads for a figurehead CEO, placed in Toronto dailies and the weeklies Eye and Now.

Placement was in the sports sections of the daily newspapers and ROP in the weeklies. Non-traditional placement provided extended reach against the demographic and generated several responses from the media. The ads were not placed among the real want ads, as Bud Light's target consumers - largely employed males ages 25 to 34 - would be less likely to see them.

Applicants were directed to the Bud Light Institute Web site (www.budlightinstitute.ca) in order to obtain applications and register with the Institute database. The site helped bolster the Institute's physical presence, as well as dangling proprietary offers and more guy fun.

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