At SXSW 2016, Anheuser-Busch had 2 key activations: the Budweiser Beer Garage and the Bud Light Factory. AB was looking for innovative technology to provide a better attendee experience, ensure people were enjoying their product responsibility and gain more insight from their marketing spend.
The Budweiser Beer Garage highlighted some of the innovative ways that Budweiser’s uses digital technology to improve their consumer’s experience, including social, mass-engagement efforts, in-stadium and on-premise (ie bars and restaurants) technology and their immersive 4-D Virtual Reality experience, which takes consumers on a virtual tour of where the original Budweiser product is brewed.
The next event, The Bud Light Factory was a music showcase featuring 6 different concerts over 4 days, highlighting over 30 different artists, including The Roots, Bleachers, Big Grams, Santigold, Yo Gotti and many more.
Both of these were very different kinds of events, but AB turned to FastBar to power the bars for each event to solve a few key problems:
Provide a better attendee experience - when attendees arrived at the event, they received a wristband, The wristband was used at the bar to tap to pay in less than a second
Ensure attendees are enjoying responsibly - each FastBar wristband was preloaded with a certain amount of drinks per day, depending on the event. Once an attendee’s allocation of drinks had run out, the bartender would be notified when the attendee attempted to get another drink, thus helping ensure nobody was overserved
Gain more insight - in the past, AB would only have very high level metrics around the consumption and sampling at their events, for example “attendees consumed X Bud Light bottles”, “we went through Y kegs of Budweiser”. AB invests a significant amount of money in these activations, and they needed to be able to track better metrics and prove ROI from their investment.
By using FastBar’s cashless payment system AB was able to provide a seamless attendee experience, ensure they were compliant with local laws around responsible service, and gain far more insight than they could otherwise.
Here’s some of the interest insights they were able to gain from using FastBar:
The exact number of attendees per event, including the number and percentage that actually sampled something
The busiest and least busy times for attendee arrival, including comparing across days and events
The exact number of products sampled, along with the breakdown of product type
Precise times of drinks moving across the bar, so they knew the busiest and least busy times at the bar, and could correlate that with what else was happening during that time, for example, which performers were on during the busiest and least busy times at the bar
Verbatim survey feedback from attendees, here’s a couple of examples of the survey comments from the actual attendees:
“The 4d thing was rad!! And ice cold Budweiser ain't bad either!”
“Awesome“
“Loved it”
“Awesome this was the King of Beers experience!”
In summary, by using FastBar, Anheuser Busch was able to take their activations at SXSW to the next level: enhancing the attendee experience, ensuring responsible service and gaining highly valuable insight into the success of the event.