• Brand Bacardi
• Project Bass Bins
• Service Video distribution
• Date 01 October 2007
• Headline 800,000 views build clubber buzz around remix

Background: pre-launch TV spot

In October 2007, Bacardi launched a buzz-building campaign targeted at key communities in the run-up to the UK launch of its latest TV spot, Bass Bins. The commercial was directed by Alex Rutterford, acclaimed for his work with Radiohead and Autechre, and set to a specially commissioned track by Freelance Hellraiser, a highly-regarded indie producer.

Challenge: stimulate conversation and brand re-appraisal

With 98% awareness across core markets for Bacardi's signature white rum, Bacardi had no interest in increasing brand awareness. The objective was rather to identify the brand's primary target of adventurous, digitally active, 18-29 year old men and women in the UK, and to pre-release the TV spot to them in contextually relevant, social environments where they could view and discuss the commercial amongst their peers ahead of its general release and re-appraise the Bacardi brand.

Solution: UK clubbing communities

Given the nature and credentials of the spot, and Bacardi's close association with live music, Unruly weighted activity to specialist UK music sites dedicated to dance, clubbing and live music, with a secondary emphasis on creative and filmmaking communities whose members were likely to appreciate the craft behind the ad. Unruly's network of UK music seeders, including more than a dozen UK music journalists, critics, bloggers and practitioners, were briefed to personally approach a hand-picked list of over 800 UK blogs and niche sites in order to achieve paid placement in as many credible and influential places as possible.

The activity was split into two phases, with two intense bursts of seeding activity during the first ten days of the campaign. This approach gave Unruly the opportunity to upweight the second phase of activity even more strongly to clubbing sites, where engagement and conversation were highest.

Results: massive buzz around music track

With very strong pick up from a wide range of popular and influential UK clubbing, music and listings sites, including DontStayIn, UKCD, Room Thirteen, The Stool Pigeon, View London and Ents24, Unruly reached 300,000 highly targeted UK views – over double the initial target – within the first week of activity. By the time the spot aired on TV on 15 October, it had already been watched more than 800,000 times on over 100 relevant sites, with 90% of those views occurring in the UK.

More importantly, although viral sharing of the clip was, as expected, only mild, it elicited a wide range of favourable comments on blogs, forums, and video sharing sites. Comments on Unruly's upload to their Viral Video Chart channel on YouTube, below, illustrate vividly the buzz around Freelance Hellraiser's remix of Super Bajo and the clamour to find out where and how to get hold of it. Positive feedback vindicated data from Link survey scores and reinforced Bacardi's confidence in the spot, which was heavily supported on TV throughout the last quarter of 2007.

Aside: production quality

Bacardi's Bass Bins looks and feels like a cinema advert, with its strong focus on spectacular visual effects and compelling audio. Understandably, there was some frustration articulated by viewers on YouTube about the poor quality of the video compression: there is some pixellation during the video and the pack shot at the end of the film is noticeably small and blurry. This film was shot primarily for other media and merely trailered online, but the issue does illustrate the futility of concentrating over much on production quality when shooting web video.

YouTube has, rightly, traded off video quality for widespread accessibility when selecting and developing compression technologies, and the same principle should govern video production. Whatever it is that gives a video its bite, that bite has to be vividly experienceable when viewed in a tiny media player a few hundred pixels high. In this case, the force of the music carried the clip, and Unruly compensated for the short-comings of video sharing sites by syndicating extremely high quality versions of the film to ad archives and creative review sites.

Agency credits

• Creative: RKCR/Y&R
• Production: RSA
• Post Production: The Moving Picture Company
• Audio: Pitch&Sync
• Planning: Unruly Media