AB InBev Beck's Ice

The Objective

Increasing awareness and brand associations for Beck's Ice in Vietnam

Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) is one of the world's largest beverage companies. Its family of drinks brands are known the world over. AB InBev Vietnam wanted to drive brand awareness and the brand association "chilling with friends" for Beck's Ice with GenZ, and during the highly competitive festive season of Tet. The brand's specific target metrics were increasing share of voice and impressions among GenZ in major cities: Ho Chi Minh City & Hanoi. Increasing share of voice during the biggest holiday of the year was a huge task. So, AB InBev Vietnam decided to invest in a full-funnel TikTok campaign with strong GenZ insight & creative assets to make the biggest splash possible.

The Solution

Creating a full-funnel campaign to maximize reach and drive awareness

While reaching its target audience of 18-24 year olds in Vietnam, AB InBev Vietnam wanted to inspire GenZ to unlock their authentic passion with the tension of always being compared to Con Nha Nguoi Ta in tet. The home of authentic community engagement, TikTok was the ideal venue for the campaign. In fact, AB InBev invested 100% in TikTok for the campaign, with an integrated strategy that leveraged the full suite of TikTok solutions.

On the content side, the drinks brand created a vibrant TikTok music video as the key asset. AB InBev followed best practices, meaning sound-on, vertical creatives focused on the people in-frame. The brand also leveraged TikTok's H5 and creator package, collaborating with multiple creators to amplify the campaign.

Magic H5 is a microsite that can be customized as an in-app landing page. It displays a variety of information on one page to effectively deliver key messages. Unlike generic H5, Magic H5 enables in-app interactions with TikTok features, from following accounts and LIVE booking, to redirecting users to Branded Hashtag Challenge pages. It can also link to external pages.

Next, to expand the reach and support the main KPIs of share of voice and impressions, AB InBev leveraged paid media solutions. In-Feed brand auction ads spread the message far and wide, while Reach & Frequency helped to re-target users. The brand also used innovative ad features such as pop-out showcase ads and display cards to highlight key campaign assets and calls to action.

Throughout the campaign, AB InBev ran a Brand Lift Study to verify the impact of its full-funnel TikTok campaign. The Brand Lift Study works by identifying a representative subset of the total campaign audience for the measurement study, and then randomly assigning them into the treatment or control group. Users assigned to the treatment group are shown the ad, whereas users assigned to the control group are deliberately suppressed from seeing the ad.

Both groups of users are served with the same survey for measuring brand metrics, and ultimately the results between both groups are compared and evaluated for statistically significant differences. This experimental design makes it possible to determine the causal effect of the campaign on brand metrics of an advertiser.

The Results

Outperforming country metrics as confirmed via Brand Lift Study

AB InBev's Brand Lift Study confirmed that the campaign achieved outstanding lift, far above average metrics in Vietnam. For the key brand metrics of awareness and brand association, AB InBev's campaign achieved 5.3% and 2.4% in absolute lift, respectively.

The uptick in awareness can be attributed to the fact AB InBev followed some creative best practices, such as highlighting brand cues including the Beck's Ice logo, the product itself, as well as the brand colors. Plus, the unique sounds of the specially-created music video played a factor as well. The creatives also leveraged TikTok’s add-on solutions such as display cards to improve viewability and the clickthrough rate.

What's more, the campaign achieved an impressive 8.26M unique reach. And by experimenting with innovative solutions such as H5, the Beck's Ice campaign outperformed local engagement rate benchmarks at 20.38%.