S&N: San Miguel finds the ‘Hidden Depths’ of hard to reach consumers

Advertising wasn’t reaching out to a key sector of San Miguel’s target audience – namely urban 25-35 males. The aim of San Miguel Hidden Depths was to target and engage this group through challenging them to ‘look that little bit deeper’ as they are given a rare insight into the musical and visual inspirations of some of the UK’s most intriguing multimedia artists.

The ‘Hidden Depths’ concept was developed from two key insights. Functionally San Miguel bucks the trend doing well in taste tests, due to it being both refreshing but with a depth of flavour. Moreover, looking at the audience we knew that they crave new content and experiences and will not only seek it out – but pass it on. In short they want social currency – as it defines them showing their hidden depths.

Rather than competing like any other beer brand the brand behaved like a promoter – speaking in a language their audience understands. All promotion was delivered at a grass roots level, so people had to ‘find out’ about the events, whether from an email from a featured artist, a flyer found from our street campaigns, or a tip-off from our online influencers. All this drove them to apply for tickets at sanmiguel.co.uk – where they could also download exclusive mixes, videos and tracks.

The first series of events took place in San Miguel stockists, curated by a different guest host from the worlds of music and multi-media – including Warp Films, Chromeo, Secret Sundaze, Wall of sound and It’s Pop! It’s Art! In terms of attendance, the number of attendees was and will always be limited – these exclusive events are designed to only reach 4-5k people per year. However, amplified through pre-promotion, online and PR, the reach was extended to over 133 million opportunities to see.

More important than the numbers reached, however, is the quality of those interactions. Rather than simple exposure, it is far more important to have more targeted ‘long conversations’, turning adopters into adorers, rather than lots of ‘brief chats’ with a wide net of fickle consumers. 74k consumers had an active experience creating 64k confirmed brand endorsers, each telling an average of 11 people of their positive experience of the brand. That equates to 704k shiny peer-to-peer endorsements.

Following the success of the campaign in 2007, the campaign tripled in size in 2008 and is now used as an example of future-proofing a brand and best practice within the S&N business.

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