For its first attempt at hosting 50 concerts in all 50 states on the same day, Bud Light had modest goals for the audience it wanted to reach as part of 50/50/1, a nationwide event held Aug. 1 to celebrate its Bud Light Music First program. As part of a live-stream deal for five of those concerts with Myspace, the client told its Web partner that its most aggressive goal was to hit 2 million streams from 1 million unique users with an average of 10 minutes spent per viewer.
By night’s end, Bud Light and Myspace soared past that benchmark with 2.5 million streams, close to 1.5 million unique viewers and more than 13 minutes spent per viewer, according to exclusive data obtained by Billboard. That was in addition to the 240,000 downloads of the Bud Light app, which hosted 337,000 plays of the Music First game (including 245,000 wins); the 525,000 fans who engaged with a Bud Light post on Twitter or Facebook; and the 52,000 collective attendees at the 50 concerts-averaging more than 1,000 fans apiece.
In one day, Bud Light managed to reach an audience and build enough buzz that many brands take weeks or even months to amass. Case in point: Pop-Tarts partnered with Live Nation last summer for a series of concerts that, during the course of two months, helped the brand gain 250,000 new fans on Facebook and a 5% sales bump during the second quarter.
Like Pop-Tarts, Bud Light used national TV and radio advertising to promote the program, with an ad spend that could total as high as $29 million, based on what the brand spent on measured media during second-quarter 2012, according to Kantar Media.
Bud Light VP Rob McCarthy credits promoter partner Live Nation for pulling off the scale and reach of the ambitious event. “Probably no one else on the planet could pull off an event with us like this,” he says. “I certainly didn’t have enough people to cover all 50 states.”
Initial planning for 50/50/1 began in late 2012, with booking of the concerts kicking off in late spring once Live Nation had a sense of which artists would be on tour this summer. National TV ads for the program started hitting the air in May, along with more than 85 million Music First-branded packages hitting retail at more than 90,000 locations.
“A lot of times brands will have a big idea, but then they don’t utilize their marketing muscle to really bring it to life,” says Russell Wallach, president of Live Nation Network, the promoter’s sponsorship arm. “Bud Light truly put the resources behind it to make it work.”