I came across Rivet Global’s summer internship application while researching open positions at their company. Unfortunately, I don’t qualify for the internship because A) I’m not currently a college senior, and B) the San Francisco office is not one of the offices that run their internship program. However, I thought the idea of including a practical exam as part of the application process was interesting, so I decided, for fun, to try my hand at the Account Coordinator prompt anyway.
A summary of the prompt goes as follows (the complete application materials can be found on Rivet’s website at www.rivetglobal.com/pdf/RivetInternApplication2013.pdf):
Kilcully, a microbrew in the Nashville area, is looking to expand nationally, starting with Cleveland, Ohio as a test market. Kilcully has long been the favored beer of the Nashville country music scene, from dive bar gigs to big name concerts. Market research has shown that likely converts in the Cleveland area love beer and love local events. Using this information, complete the application’s three parts.
Part One: Write an assignment brief for the Kilcully account using a given template.
Part Two: Discuss what information seemed missing in the provided materials and what research should be done to address those weaknesses.
Part Three: Since everyone at Rivet is encouraged to participate in the creative process, offer some of your own creative ideas about a possible Kilcully campaign.
Note: Since this has evolved from something to do for just myself into something for my blog, I have included an annotated version of part one, the assignment brief, at the bottom of the post that explains the thought process behind each of the answers I provided.
The Application
1. The Assignment Brief
a. Assignment: Develop a comprehensive new advertising campaign to test Kilcully’s viability as a national brand using Cleveland, Ohio as a test market. This campaign is designed to launch the Kilcully brand in the Cleveland area, but should have enough flexibility that it can be scaled nationally per Kilcully’s long-term goals.
b. Objective: To position Kilcully Beer as real beer with real flavor for real people in order to drive sales in bars and clubs in the Cleveland market area.
c. Brand Benefit: Kilcully has its roots deeply planted in the country music scene. Like country music, it has its own unique flavor developed by down-to-earth American craftsmen.
d. Barrier or Challenge: The biggest challenge facing Kilcully is their anonymity outside their local Nashville market. The second biggest, and related, challenge facing Kilcully is getting enough market presence in the Cleveland area to be included in the limited selection of spirits at bars and clubs.
e. Target: Meet Brad, a mid-20s midwesterner who lives in a major city. As a midwesterner, he thinks of himself as someone who embraces the genuine, someone who comes from rural values, someone who would be considered salt of the earth, with a bit of a rebellious streak. As an urbanite, he considers himself someone with a bit of refinement. He appreciates the finer things in life too. He supports the local arts scene and local, family owned businesses. He drinks beer, not wine, but he wants a beer with some cache: more expensive than a mainstream national brand, but worth the extra cost.
f. Target Insight: The most important attributes of our target consumer, in relation to Kilcully beer, is their appreciation of a full-flavored beer and their support of arts, especially the country music scene.
g. Strategy: Convince adventurous beer lovers in the Cleveland area to try a new microbrew by appealing to their emotional attachment to country music and American heartland values.
h. Considerations/Mandatories: Considerations for media planning should include print ads in alt-press publications in the Cleveland area, buzz generating stunts, a user generated content driven social media campaign, and event sponsorships focused around music. Mandatories for campaign execution are a tagline, a revised website, an improved social media presence, two or three solid ideas for taking concert sponsorship to the next level, and two or three buzz generating events featuring Kilcully that are feasible in the Cleveland area.
2. There are two areas of interest in which I would like to conduct more research in order to collect information I think was missing in the original materials.
The first area of interest is in consumer insights. I made assumptions in my brief based on things I inferred from the existing research that would be nice to confirm with more data and more research. On the one hand, I would like more insight into how existing Kilcully consumers think, feel and behave in regards to their beer selection. How important is music, culture, and the country/rural ethos to current consumers of Kilcully’s beers? On the other hand, I would like to know more about Kilcully’s future markets. How do Cleveland beer drinkers think, feel, and behave in regards to their current selection of beers? How big is the culture scene in Cleveland? How big is country music in Cleveland? How big is the country music scene around the United States, in other markets Kilcully would eventually like to enter?
The second area of interest is in researching the competition. The given materials offer no information about Kilcully’s current and potential competitors. This information could be invaluable in determining how the campaign presents Kilcully and the approach to execution the campaign takes. While the competition with known, national brands is apparent, we know nothing about what other microbrews might already exist in the Cleveland area. It could be critical to know what niche markets are under- or un-served by existing Cleveland brands. Who makes up the local competition and how big are they? What flavors (pale ale, stout, etc.) are those local breweries serving? Which of those flavors are popular and which are duds? How do these competitor breweries brand themselves and does it conflict with Kilcully’s current, and potential future, branding? If Kilcully has been successful positioning itself against Nashville microbrews, what can we learn from that when moving forward, both in Cleveland and on a national scale?
3. Rather than offer up my own thoughts on possible taglines or ad layouts, I thought it would be best to talk about the values the ad should espouse. This more closely reflects the kind of relationship I would want to develop with the creative team, collaborating on the pathos of the ads while leaving the clever bits to the professionals. It also more closely reflects my own creative process in video production, focusing on what the core emotions of the piece should be and making the production decisions reflect that. So the input I would offer on the creative side, the development of actual copy and art direction, would be to focus on aligning Kilcully with four core ideas: music, family, heritage, and quality. Music is obviously tied to Kilcully in a number of ways, both in the minds of the consumers and in the history of the Kilcully family (I go into this in much greater detail in the annotated brief, below). Family is also a strong concept. As my assignment brief points out, Kilcully is a beer that appeals to people with heartland values, of which family values are an important subset. Plus, Kilcully is a family name, so making a connection to the importance of family fits with the company’s brand. The prompt doesn’t say if Kilcully is, or even started as, a family business, but if either is true, even better. Heritage fits with Kilcully’s brand and target insights as well. Kilcully, through its country music ties and its twenty year history of brewing, would do well being aligned with Americana. Something with the same pathos, but not the same execution, as Dodge Ram’s “God Made a Farmer” 2013 Super Bowl ad would work for a brand like Kilcully. Finally, quality is not to be ignored. If Kilcully wants to become the brand of country music lovers, it needs to be positioned against beers already popular in the country music scene. This means highlighting the weakness of those beers, Budweiser and Coors are notorious for watered down flavor, in relation to the strengths of Kilcully, microbrews are known for being more flavorful than national brands (I go into this in much greater detail in the annotated brief as well, below).
When it comes to execution, I think a great launch campaign for Kilcully would be to bring together a lot of different elements around a central event, such as a sponsored music festival. If the budget supports it, developing and advertising a brand new music event would be best, but if not, becoming the title sponsor of an existing event would also work. Since Kilcully is so wedded to country music in Nashville, and I believe the insights of the assignment brief support this as a major selling point of the brand, continuing this relationship between music and Kilcully is a solid bet. A big, exciting music festival will generate a lot of buzz offline, but any full-featured campaign should look to generate buzz online as well. Content campaigns, supported by a good contest to encourage participation, are a great way to turn a brand into a selection of sharable objects that can be passed around online as a form of word-of-mouth. At the Kilcully sponsored music festival, there could be a contest to take pictures at the concert that highlight good people, good beer, and good music, the core of Kilcully’s brand image, and then upload them to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter with #Kilcully. The contest winner would win free beer, or concert tickets, or some other give-away that tested well with the target market. While it might be difficult to arrange with the participating musicians, this could also be done with video, a la Beastie Boys’ “Awesome, I F***ing Shot That!”, where participants were allowed to record the concert. For the Beastie Boys, it was so that footage could become part of a documentary film. For Kilcully, the audience could simply be allowed to bootleg the concert and take their footage home to edit themselves, with the best edits winning prizes. As with the pictures, the submissions would be tagged with Kilcully. This is an easy way to make a very effective and engaging content marketing campaign to generate online buzz out of an event that was already worth running. The content generated from the content campaign could even be integrated into future advertising for the Kilcully brand. These same ideas could also work on a smaller scale by applying them to many open-mic nights and small venue music nights instead of a single big event. This would take the same good ideas and use them over a longer period of time, with more iterations, and potentially reach more people in the long run, but wouldn’t have the same immediate splash that one large-scale, large-draw music event would have. If the budget was large enough, Kilcully could even consider running both the large and small-scale versions of this sponsorship campaign. Either way, by linking the online and offline elements of the campaign, the buzz from each will feed the other. Those who went will have a great experience where the sponsor will be more memorable because of the engaging contest they ran, and those who didn’t go will have their social media feeds filled with branded content from the event, making Kilcully again more memorable by tying it to the positive side of a negative emotion: Kilcully was behind that thing I regret not attending.
Finally, when it comes to driving direct sales on premise, thought needs to be given to how the bar and club scene operates. Lots of subtle changes to Kilcully’s branding can make people more aware of Kilcully as a brand, but to actually drive sales on premise, there needs to be an element to any expansion plan that addresses the on premise environment. For a new brand, being selected by bars as one of their ‘on-tap’ options can be a great boost. Being selected for a tap is a tacit recommendation from the bartender and a classier way to display the beer’s logo than a neon sign. Often, when people I know are looking to try a new beer at a bar, they first check to see what’s on tap before asking the bartender for a recommendation. If an eye-catching logo and an unusual name can draw the attention of a bar’s patrons, it might get them to try a Kilcully. On top of that, being on tap is especially good for a microbrew, since draft beers generally maintain their flavor much better than bottled or canned, highlighting one of the biggest benefits of Kilcully over a national brand. To encourage bartenders and bar owners to put Kilcully on tap, Kilcully could send free samples of the most popular of their numerous beers to bars so that the proprietors will know the high quality of the beer before they start stocking it. I would also recommend that Kilcully consider covering the sunk costs of adding Kilcully to their tap, specifically providing the logoed tap and other equipment for free, and even possibly including free delivery for the barrels of fresh brew, to smooth out the disincentives to adding the beer. If the brews are really good, and the advertising creates demand, bars will want to carry Kilcully’s offerings, and this will help grease the process. If Kilcully was open to it, I would also recommend taking a look at the logo, from the image layout to the color scheme, to ensure that it looks as good on a tap as it does on the side of a bottle in order maximize the conversion from window shoppers to drinkers at each bar or club.
The Annotated Assignment Brief
1. The Assignment Brief
a. Assignment: Develop a comprehensive new advertising campaign to test Kilcully’s viability as a national brand using Cleveland, Ohio as a test market. This campaign is designed to launch the Kilcully brand in the Cleveland area, but should have enough flexibility that it can be scaled nationally per Kilcully’s long-term goals.
The assignment itself is fairly self-explanatory from the prompt materials. The important aspects I took the time to highlight were that the campaign should be comprehensive and that the campaign needed to be flexible and scalable. Kilcully is looking to drive sales in a region where it currently has no presence, so a comprehensive campaign, one that includes traditional, social media, event, and web marketing, will be needed to generate the kind of buzz that will get a newcomer noticed. At the same time, Kilcully isn’t just looking for a one city expansion, it is looking to eventually become a national brand. As a result, the campaign shouldn’t be too focused on what will work in the Cleveland area, and should keep in mind that whatever campaign is developed needs to work around the country. This will serve both the client and the agency well. For the client, they are getting a better view of what universal ideas can sell their beer nationally, with Cleveland as their test bed, instead of what localized ideas can sell more beer in the Cleveland area. For the agency, they are positioning themselves to grow with Kilcully by demonstrating the ability to generate campaigns that can continue to work as Kilcully continues to expand.
b. Objective: To position Kilcully Beer as real beer with real flavor for real people in order to drive sales in bars and clubs in the Cleveland market area.
The point of an objective statement changes slightly from creative brief to creative brief, so I decided to use the objective statement, per one school of thought, to include a statement about the branding goals as well as the sales goals. Having thought at great length about what Kilcully stood for, and the mindset of its current consumer base, I decided that significant power lay in its association with country music. From there, I considered beers popular amongst rural and rural-minded people, usually cheap national brands like Bud Light, Coors, Keystone, etc., which have a reputation for being watered down and low in flavor. To position Kilcully against these brands, I wanted to emphasize real beer and real flavor. The final piece was to connect that idea of real flavor to the target demographics’ love of the genuine, giving the final guiding direction for the creative team of positioning Kilcully as real beer with real flavor for real people. The sales portion of the objective, the goal of driving on-location sales in the Cleveland area, is taken from the prompt materials themselves.
c. Brand Benefit: Kilcully has its roots deeply planted in the country music scene. Like country music, it has its own unique flavor developed by down-to-earth American craftsmen.
Repeated again and again throughout the prompt materials was the importance of music to Kilcully. According to the research provided, it’s the beer of choice of the Nashville country music scene, from big name shows to the independents. Nashville is the heartland of country music. The brewery founder, Chris Kilcully, comes from a family of musicians, many generations deep. The target insight provided points out that the target demographic supports the local arts, including music, and always knows about the local weekend events, implicitly referring to music concerts, amongst others. Overwhelmingly, the evidence suggests that one of the strongest shared interests of Kilcully drinkers is music, specifically country, and that as result, country music culture should be given appropriate weight in the branding. Tying a beer to a music scene, even if it happens by accident, can be very beneficial to a brand. Pabst Blue Ribbon became the beer of choice amongst Hipsters, and by extension became tied to their love of ambiguously named Indie music, and the sales of the beer broke a two-decade slump. Applying the same association with country music, especially on a national scale, could pay great dividends for Kilcully’s brand. Country music isn’t just about the music, though. As with any music fandom, there is a set of cultural attitudes that come with it as well. This could be the kind of clothes they wear, the cars and/or trucks they drive, and even their worldview. In our case, I specifically wanted to highlight the fact that Kilcully’s history reflects the commonly understood worldview of country music fans – they like down-to-earth people and American made products, especially if that also means they can take pride in its higher quality.
d. Barrier or Challenge: The biggest challenge facing Kilcully is their anonymity outside their local Nashville market. The second biggest, and related, challenge facing Kilcully is getting enough market presence in the Cleveland area to be included in the limited alcohol selection at bars and clubs.
While the prompt asks to list the biggest barrier or challenge, I wanted to make sure to include two, because each is important in their own way. Any luxury consumer brand in a popular field, like an alcoholic beverage, will have trouble breaking into a regional market. There is so much competition that finding that hole, that niche, in which to position the brand is going to be a challenge. So making the creative team aware that they are not only trying to build an existing brand, but break an existing brand into a market where they are literally a non-entity, is very important to getting the kind of buzzworthy campaign that will make an unknown stand out in the crowd. It is also important to make the creative team aware that, since the goal is to drive sales in bars and clubs, there will be the added wrinkle of convincing bar and club owners to stock the beer in the first place. While bars and clubs carry lots of alcohol, they also have a limited amount of storage space, and therefore won’t necessarily carry every available brand. Simply generating demand might encourage owners to begin stocking Kilcully to meet the frequent requests of patrons, but it is not safe to assume that it will be enough to accomplish this. This complexity is similar to that of an advertising campaign for a car; a campaign needs to sell to the dealer as much as it needs to sell to the public. The second challenge is a gentle reminder of this truth.
e. Target: Meet Brad, a mid-20s midwesterner who lives in a major city. As a midwesterner, he thinks of himself as someone who embraces the genuine, someone who comes from rural values, someone who would be considered salt of the earth, with a bit of a rebellious streak. As an urbanite, he considers himself someone with a bit of refinement. He appreciates the finer things in life too. He supports the local arts scene and local, family owned businesses. He drinks beer, not wine or cocktails, but he wants a beer with some cache: more expensive than a mainstream national brand, but worth the extra cost.
I chose to use an example persona to establish the target because it makes it easy to see the kind of person that makes up the target demographic in one’s mind’s eye if they are described like a person you might know in real life. I came to the realization while I was developing this brief that the target market is a person who walks on both sides of a line, and therefore has two seemingly conflicted identities. On the one hand, they love country music and the attitudes that come with that. On the other hand, they live in a major metropolitan area, probably in the city itself, and therefore have many of the quirks of city folk, including that urban mindset that enjoys the finer things and has an element of pretention to it. Although this term is out-of-vogue now, they are basically modern urban cowboys. I described them to myself at one point as being the kind of person people think Clint Eastwood is. His roles make us see him as independent and a rugged individualist, and his off screen persona is cultured and thoughtful. I decided to describe Brad as two distinct pieces of a whole to highlight both sides of his personality, as both are relevant to Kilcully’s image.
f. Target Insight: The most important attributes of our target consumer, in relation to Kilcully beer, is their appreciation of a full-flavored beer and their support of arts, especially the country music scene.
This insight came from a synthesis of things I’ve talked about previously in these annotations. Kilcully’s target demographic is beer connoisseurs, so I know they value a full flavored beer. As I mentioned in my annotation on the assignment objective, this means that Kilcully can position themselves against the national brands with a reputation for bland flavor. Kilcully’s target demographic supports the arts, so I know that making music an important element of Kilcully’s image will likely be very successful. As I mentioned in my annotation on brand benefit, Kilcully already has inroads in the country music scene that can be leveraged to establish Kilcully in the Cleveland area. Similarly, Kilcully’s long history with music can be used to make an emotional appeal to potential consumers through their love of the arts. So with these combined ideas, presented as one target insight, we have a way to get people to notice Kilcully and a way to position it against some of the known competition.
g. Strategy: Convince adventurous beer lovers in the Cleveland area to try a new microbrew by appealing to their emotional attachment to country music and American heartland values.
The prompt wasn’t explicit about what to do with the strategy section of the brief, other than to describe how the agency would accomplish the objective. This could have meant strategy like media planning and execution or it could have meant a one-sentence strategy statement. I chose to keep things simple, as is recommended in creative briefs, and stick to a one-sentence strategy statement. I moved the media strategy elements to the considerations/mandatories question, based on a related interpretation of the prompt materials. The strategy statement itself served as an opportunity to bring together the positioning and sales goals of the objective with the information gleaned from the brand benefit and target insights, and set them against solving the problem of the barrier or challenge. In this way, the strategy statement, while slightly redundant with every other section of the brief, consolidates the previous elements of the brief into a single, simple statement of the overarching creative plan moving forward within the agency, separate from the questions of execution. This interpretation of this question, and the next, sets up a structure to the end of the brief that I rather like. I wrap up the conclusions about the creative direction of the campaign nicely, before immediately transitioning into a final section about the considerations for execution that should be kept in mind while freeform brainstorming the creative aspects of the overall campaign.
h. Considerations/Mandatories: Considerations for media planning should include print ads in alt-press publications in the Cleveland area, buzz generating stunts, a user generated content driven social media campaign, and event sponsorships focused around music. Mandatories for campaign execution are a tagline, a revised website, an improved social media presence that can function as a base on which to build buzzworthy stunts, sponsorships, and events.
Considerations/Mandatories wasn’t well defined by the prompt materials, but it is commonly used to refer to considerations given to the media planning and execution, and mandatory elements to the campaign. Using this interpretation, I started with suggestions for the types of media in which the advertising should be placed. Using context clues from the prompt material, and my own thoughts about effective launch campaigns, I came up with the list I gave above. Beautiful print ads can do a lot to establish an image for a brand with just a picture and some minimalist copy, and alt-press is more likely to reach the target demographic than mainstream press. Big stunts get a lot of attention which can be leveraged into awareness for an otherwise unknown brand. User-generated content gets the customers actively involved with a company’s social media, which makes it more than a boring, one-way conversation. Sponsorship of music events just makes sense with a brand that is planning to tie itself to music.
I followed this up with the mandatories for the execution, which are mostly centered on improving the brand image. The prompt gives no information about Kilcully’s company, like their existing logo and tagline or what their web and social media presence looks like. For this answer, I assumed that, like many moderately sized businesses, they have some online presence, but that their website and social media outlets could use a good going-over by the professional design team of a creative agency. As far as logo and tagline, I went with the assumption that their logo was well established and non-negotiable but that the tagline could, and should, be changed to reflect the new campaign being developed. If things like the packaging and the logo were open to changes I would suggest exploring how to make Kilcully’s unique, as young people are often drawn to the unusual when selecting a new alcoholic beverage. I did not include things like my personal belief in the power of music event sponsorship, buzz generating stunts, or a user-driven content campaign because I had mentioned those as possible campaign executions in the considerations section and outside of that, I don’t think it is my place as an accounts person to prejudice the creative team in that way. Instead, I discussed those ideas in more length in part three of the application, where Rivet looks for creative input from all candidates.