Twisted Tea & Jake the Viking
I was watching football this weekend [ROLL TIDE] and a very interesting commercial showed up a few times that you might have seen. It was a Twisted Tea commercial with this bearded fellow in shorts, an apron and shoulder pads. The commercial wanted the viewer to send in videos and show them how you tailgate. A MASSIVE PRIZE DUMP would rain upon the winner of copious amounts of Twisted Tea and swag.
I love Vikings in aprons, don’t you?
If you know me, or have read ever talked to me about content, you know that this is absolutely my JAM. Let's find fans and have them submit photos and videos for your brand to use on social media. I was intrigued to say the least.
Doing a little research, I figured out that the bearded fellow was Jake the Viking who has a massive following of over 760k on Instagram and it's a good mix of guys and gals and he sells his lifestyle, beard products and legit looks like a Viking. So, although I didn't know him, a bunch of folks do and I am old so no big deal.
I also checked out Twisted Tea's IG to see if they use submitted pictures and videos which they do on the Twisted Tea Nation feed but the link from the main website is broken so it took a minute.
Here is my question to my marketing friends out there. They probably paid a pretty penny to have that commercial made with Jake and even more to place the commercials during football games and I would be curious to know if it paid off.
A couple of stats:
Last FB post was on June 1, 2020
Jake the Viking has 763k followers on IG
Twisted has only 1381 followers on the Twisted Nation IG.
I absolutely love the vibe of the ads and it reminds me of Chubbies and their viral ads but if they are not gaining followers and not using the UGC, there must be some other KPI they are focusing on like overall sales lift which is a good measure but I wonder if they focused on nuturing their fans and followers, they would see even more lift.
Keep working it Jake!
And if anyone from Twisted reads this, I would love to talk so I can understand the approach because I love the ads.