Vodka with style and an election game with punch
OPINION: Exactly 10 years ago, New Zealand vodka company 42 Below was sold to global liquor conglomerate Bacardi for $138 million.
Initially created in the garage of Wellington ad man Geoff Ross and his wife Justine Troy, 42 Below went on to win international vodka competitions. Importantly, it also built a global brand that made bartenders and consumers sit up and take notice. It built desirability.
The story is caught beautifully in Ross and Troy’s book Every Bastard Says No which paints a yeasty picture of how the pair – together with business partners and staff – risked all and worked their butts off to achieve success.
The irreverent tome includes the story of the skunkworks video that the company put together to raise awareness. The original video was inaccurate, ill-judged, probably libellous and devastatingly brilliant in its effect.
I remember it doing the rounds around the big Aussie corporate I was working in during the early-2000s. Crowds of people standing around desks watching it on YouTube. Laughing their bums off then emailing to mates.
The made-on-a-shoestring 42 Below video was NZ’s first homegrown ‘‘viral’’ campaign. Viral here means a marketing campaign that uses existing social networks and is memorable enough that it creates a self-replicating dynamic. Effectively, it’s word of mouth on nitrous oxide.
And as my old social media mate Vaughn Davis will tell you, many marketing consultants are called on to create viral campaigns, but few are chosen by consumers.
The election campaign that we have experienced over the past two months has been characterised by twists, turns and action aplenty. But from a digital marketing point of view, it seems to have been a bit of a fizzer.
The closest thing to a viral campaign I saw was some bright spark in the Labour Party. S/he spread a meme of Jacinda Ardern looking pretty stern along with the words ‘‘Jacinda Ardern has no time for your s...’’ after shock jock Mark Richardson got more than he bargained for in an early morning interview.
Most of the parties harnessed display advertising across the big news media platforms like Stuff and the display networks offered via the Google and Facebook ecosystems.
Battle to the Beehive lets you select your fighter – be it a Wonder Womanthemed Jacinda Ardern, kickboxer Bill English or kung fu queen Marama Fox.
But from what I’ve seen, this typically hasn’t involved any digital retargeting. Simply put, retargeting is the process of identifying a specific browser and ‘‘following them around the internet’’ with slightly different messages until you demonstrate enough relevancy to get a click-through.
Both the Greens and The Opportunities Party have made good use of Facebook to target demographics who were relevant to them, and then invite them along to political meetings close by.
But the best evidence I saw of creative thinking for digital execution over the election campaign came from two outfits that are non-party political: The Design and Democracy project at Massey University, and Heyday Digital in Wellington.
The Design and Democracy team have been in business since 2014 with their onthefence.co.nz website. Simply put, it’s a tool that appears high in any organic search on electoral policy and which lets you work out which of the eight parties best matches up with your values.
But my digital-platform pick is battletothebeehive.co.nz, a browserbased fighting game created by some oldschool gamers at Heyday Digital/JWT for Vice Global.
It lets you select your fighter – be it a Wonder Woman-themed Jacinda Ardern, kickboxer Bill English or kung fu queen Marama Fox – then literally fight policy monsters.
These range from transport, to the economy to education. All of which you can punch, kick or jump on, complete with 1980s-style sound effects and low-fi graphics.
Along the way you get prompted with voting and enrolment questions which win you extra health points.
Overall it’s a thoroughly irreverent but educational experience. As I played it, I couldn’t help but think it’s exactly the sort of thing that the Electoral Commission needed to be doing.
It’s also a sign of the lateral thinking that’s required to create communication content that is truly able to become selfreplicating, if 51,000 likes on Facebook is anything to go by.
Plus, it tracks the popularity of party leaders based on their demonstrated combat skills. Which at the time of writing, saw Ardern leading English by 3.8 points.
So come this election tomorrow night, I know what I’m doing. Sipping 42 Below and playing Battle to the Beehive. ❚ Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is an e-commerce manager and professional director. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he reckons 42 Below makes the best vodka martinis.