Problem Solved: How Coors Light 'Calendar Blocker' Helped Fans Enjoy March Madness

March Madness, one of the most viewed sporting events in the US. But there was a problem for fans. With much of the action happening during working hours, it was hard for fans to enjoy the games. VMLY&R Commerce turned to an untapped media space, using one of the most popular social networks since the pandemic and remote work – Microsoft Teams – that allowed fans to block their calendars and escape busy schedules to catch all the March Madness action.  

What You Made

In order to orientate our readers, we need to start at the end! Tell us about what the outcome/product is and why you think it’s of interest, either from a design/tech perspective or how in its application to the client’s particular sector.

We didn’t really 'make' anything, what we did do, was find a fun way to hack one of the most used social media platforms – Microsoft Teams!

Through smart media buys and a “simple” microsite, we found a unique way to promote Coors Light as the beer of choice during one of the biggest college sporting events in the US … March Madness.

We used the platform to deliver secret Coors Light deals directly to college basketball fans, blocking their Teams calendars during working hours so they could get away from their desks and enjoy the March Madness action with Coors Light.

The Problem

The client brief was straight forward – without being an official sponsor, and with no TV media, what can we do to ensure Coors Light could maintain game day awareness while converting consumers during March Madness, especially as competition in stores was increasing and out of home usage came back?

Just like any sporting event, there are a ton of brands vying for consumer attention in a hundred different ways. We knew there had to be a new way to connect fans with Coors Light, but it took a few different pieces for us to get to where we needed to go.

What we ended up identifying as the problem to solve, was that in the early stages of the tournament when games were played during working hours, fans were unable to get away from their computers to watch them. 

Ideation

Once we identified that moment, it became a case of figuring out how Coors could 'own' that moment both on a relatively small budget, and with a short turnaround time.

The most important thing for us was to make something that was fun, simple to engage with and didn’t take itself too seriously – and we felt we found the perfect way in.

There’s a huge movement around the idea of skipping work during March Madness – from news articles and blogs, to YouTube videos and social content educating fans on the best excuses and ways to ditch work and catch the game during working hours.

The initial thought was very simple, if slightly ineloquent; “give fans time off to watch the games”. But this gave us a unique moment to own during the tournament. We just had to find a way to connect the way that people work, with the way they watch the games.

Enter everyone’s (least) favourite social media platform, Microsoft Teams. It’s something we use every day and we certainly have a love hate relationship with, but Teams has a couple of key features that made it the perfect platform to utilise for this campaign.

Firstly, Teams has a small but very significant feature. The only time you’re truly unavailable is when your status is ‘in a call’. So how do we create moments of 'unavailable' that could coincide with the game times that were important to the user, and therefore 'blocked' on their calendar?

Secondly, the ability to deliver Coors deals to fans in the simplest way possible was important and Teams’ screen share function was the perfect way to serve these up in a simple and effective fashion.

Prototype and Design

Thankfully, we have an incredible internal agency technology team who made the process of bringing the creative commerce project to life a much easier one than we could have envisioned, though we’re about 99% sure it wasn’t easy at all. Shout out to Ivan Mayes, Thomas Mercurio, Jake Swiatek and team.

We constantly throw things at these guys with little to no appreciation of how technical even the most seemingly simple things are to bring to life.

The solution: utilising an untapped post-pandemic work from home message app – Microsoft Teams – we converted its native functionality to incentivised fans to block their work schedules with us, embedding secret Coors Light promotional codes directly into discreet meeting invites.

We thought the biggest technical hurdle would be to figure out how to create multiple meetings and mailing lists based on the user’s team selection. Turns out though that was pretty easily handled by pushing users to sign-up on a microsite to select their favourite teams and add their email address. Once they did this, they were discreetly sent invites that blocked calendars on game day, and therefore changing their status from 'available' to 'in a call'. But the difficulty came in creating new meetings as the tournament progressed because that information needed to be updated manually.

Poor Thomas put his hand up to take one for the team and updated the brackets himself round on round to make sure all the new invites went out to the fans of the teams that advanced.

Live

We had to set up some fake rounds to make sure the invites came through and populated directly into people’s calendars.  Again, the technology team came up clutch here, doing a mass amount of the testing internally because we had to move so quickly.

The live stage is where the media team really came into their own though. They utilised real time bidding to give us the flexibility to reach fans on the best performing and most visited NCAA news sites, like ESPN and CBS Sports. This was key in pushing fans to the microsite without giving the game away to their employers!

One of the most interesting things about this project was the challenge of producing a campaign with a much smaller budget than most of our competitors, and within a restrictive set of parameters. We knew it had to be digital and that we had to be very smart about the use of media. It forced us to think in a different way and find a ready-made application we could leverage and then insert our campaign idea into that pre-existing mechanic. Ironically it was staring us in the face (quite literally!).  The integration into Microsoft Teams allowed us to bring the brand tonality and personality through clearly by leveraging the meeting screen share function, while ensuring the conversion as we served up promotions. 

And it worked!!  After a sales decline in 2021, Calendar Blocker gave us a message to stand out from the competition.  We saw an uptake in visits to our promotional partner, Buffalo Wild Wings, paired with over 10,000 unique site visits and 7,328 calendars blocked. That's a 71% engagement rate, and an effective 0% of employees got fired for giving in to the Madness. Not to mention Coors Light sales went up versus the previous year. 

All it takes sometimes is a simple integration of tech and creativity to bring a cool, culturally-relevant idea to life that isn’t trying too hard to offer anything other than fun for our brands’ fans!