Absolut wants to help you plan your next party. Not at a bar, but a get together at your house, apartment, rooftop or backyard.
The vodka brand teamed with digital agency Big Spaceship to come up with a way to get people to incorporate Absolut into their home entertaining and gatherings. The result was Absolut Host, an online destination and mobile app for party planning tips and tools.
“The past few years Absolut has done promotions and digital efforts related specifically to drink recipes,” said Karina Portuondo, strategist at Big Spaceship. “This year, they wanted to expand this further to focus on the entire lifestyle and experience around Absolut, not just the product.”
It’s an interesting twist when you think of Absolut as a brand that’s historically relied on iconic imagery in its marketing. (Many people would actually cut out magazine ads featuring the Absolut bottle, a sort of early Pinterest.) But nowadays, useful experiences are the coin of the realm, so Absolut has morphed into an enabler.
In this case, it wants to enable parties. Absolut Host helps users pick a party theme and then generates related drink recipes, toasts and activities related to the theme. The site also provides fun facts around the chosen theme and party dates and also has a social element. Absolut Host personalizes the party planning experience by using Facebook to provide personalized party ideas based on users’ recent posts, hometown, current city and photos.
Absolut provided ethnographic and quantitative reports for the agency to study in order to get a better understanding of the demographic who entertain at home, which helped the creative team come up with ideas and content for Absolut Host.
“The goal of our brainstorms was to come up with something that’s more like a product or tool than marketing communications,” explained Portuondo. “We believed that if we could give people something useful and entertaining that would help them plan their parties, they’d think of Absolut when the time was right.”
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