The microbrewery, Good Robot Brewing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has created a unique campaign called, ‘Become a Micro-Influencer’ that will run until November 14. The campaign runs as follows: the business will basically pay $1 to anyone who takes a photograph with their product and posts it on the social media website Instagram.
“We were expressing concerns about the influencer culture in that we thought we have the largest social media following of customers in the province for a beverage company,” says Joshua Counsil, one of Good Robot Brewing Company’s co-founders. “The issue of paying select influencers to showcase products came up during a meeting with fellow co-owners Angus Campbell and Doug Kehoe and the brewery’s creative agency, Wunder. (The agency) said what if we do a micro-influencer (promotion) since you are a microbrewery and turn everyone into an influencer and give everyone the power to create content,” said Counsil.
The three of them decided that they loved this idea as it takes the traditional influencer idea and reverses it to pay only those with less than 10,000 followers to endorse its beer.
“We still work with those folks too,” admits Counsil, adding that they recently sponsored an influencer in British Columbia with a transgender partner who inquired about their Pride-dedicated THEMBOT beer. “So we do work with traditional influencers as well — we just loved the idea of turning the table and giving everyone the authority to do it.”
Participants of legal drinking age simply need to post a photo or video on Instagram with one of Good Robot’s eligible products. If they tag the photo to Good Robot and include additional tags, those so-called micro-influencers will be contacted by the brewery directly with payment details.
“You are limited to one post per eligible beverage per week,” adds Counsil. “So if you wanted to get each of those, you can do a post four times a week — one per beverage — and you can do it the next week if you like too.” “It’s been a really, really rough summer – the numbers have been really bad,” said Counsil. “The way we look at it is we have to get scrappy with our ideas and try to squeeze more out of less and sometimes a really fun, stupid, talkable idea is a really good one.”
“I think of advertising and promotions as entertain first and then create awareness from that,” says Counsil. “You can create brand salience, you can create brand awareness — I really like talkable pieces. Billboards and cans and all these things are an avenue for creativity and the reason why most people don’t like advertising is because most people do it in a pretty boring way.”
“The budgetary piece is a question mark and you have to assume a certain number of folks are going to participate and then not too many are going to try to find loopholes around it,” said Counsil. “But fundamentally it’s really just a fun, kind of stupid, talkable campaign which is right up our alley.”
Image courtesy of Good Robot Brewing