It was that time of year when Boost launched their summer on-pack promotion, this time giving consumers the chance to win the trip of a lifetime to New York. The social team were tasked with creating a social campaign with an experiential element to promote it, so off to the Nest (one of our meeting rooms at our Leeds HQ) we went to think about all things New York. A few dodgy Yankee impressions later and #TaxiToNewYork was born.
We hailed ourselves a cab which took us all the way to London and invited a whole host of celebrities along for the ride. The concept was simple – think Carpool Karaoke but with hot dog hats and an inflatable Statue of Liberty. We created three episodes of #TaxiToNewYork, a social video series to be shared across Boost’s social channels (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). Each episode starred a different celebrity guest; Love Island’s Wes Nelson, comedian London Hughes (who later absolutely smashed Edinburgh Fringe) and Capital DJ and future I’m A Celeb star, Roman Kemp. Cheeky chappy and former King of the Jungle, Joe Swash acted as our celebrity host, riding in the yellow cab with each guest and causing havoc around London, all in the name of great content. Cue New York themed sing-a-longs, pedestrian pranks and plenty of quiz questions.
The aim of the episodes, apart from great entertainment, was to increase awareness of Boost’s on-pack promotion. Each video featured the key messaging surrounding the competition, encouraging Boost fans to buy the promotional drinks and providing necessary information on how to enter in a fun and engaging way. Much more exciting than a wordy social caption! We made to capture a bunch of other content too – still images, gifs, shorter videos, stories – you name it!
The campaign didn’t stop there, it was then time for the experiential! Off our celebrities went to the jungle, TV sets and DJ booths, and it was time for us to hit the road again in the yellow cab, this time to tour Boost’s key cities; Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow. Dubbed the #TaxiTour, a follow-on campaign piggybacking on the back of #TaxiToNewYork, we brought the bright lights of the Big Apple straight to city centres across the UK over four days.
We parked up the cab in the heart of each city and brought in some New York themed entertainment in the form of break dancers and show girls to add a sense of theatre to the experiential, plus the all important free Boost to sample. The purpose of the tour was not only to raise awareness of the on-pack promotion, encouraging consumers to scan their free cans in order to increase competition entries (we saw a brilliant 17.8% entry increase during our experiential week), but we also added an additional competition exclusive to the #TaxiTour. Through targeted social ads, we encouraged the local public to seek out the yellow cab and share a picture of it on their social channels, tracked by the tag ‘#TaxiToNewYork’. This automatically entered them into a prize draw to win flights to New York whilst providing us with some great organic awareness surrounding the campaign, creating a positive social buzz around Boost.
Three long-form episodes, four celebrities, five cities and 4,800 cans of Boost later and we’d officially completed (and smashed) #TaxiToNewYork. Overall the campaign generated over one million video views and 2.8 million impressions across Boost’s social channels!
The fantastic results highlighted how using an experiential tour to support a celebrity video campaign worked extremely well to both spread awareness and engage Boost’s audience across their key cities. So for now, it’s time to leave New York behind and finally get some sleep. If we can make it there, we can make it anywhere, or so they say… Stay tuned for even bigger and better campaigns in 2020!
Watch the full #TaxiToNewYork episodes on Boost Drinks’ YouTube channel.
