Southern Comfort: Winter Wonderland activation

SHARE helped Southern Comfort drive awareness of their Winter Wonderland cocktail ‘Firepit’ activation online, with a month long Instagram influencer and event promo campaign.

Leveraging location and social habits

Southern Comfort wanted to find a way to increase the awareness of their partnership with one of the biggest annual attractions in the world, Winter Wonderland. The mission was to drive social engagement, increased bar footfall and sales of their exclusive event cocktails from the Firepit.

The London-based event is regularly photographed from every angle on Instagram. Thus, we wanted to ensure the Firepit rose to the top of the feed as the place to be. Not only in location searches but also #hashtag searches.

To accomplish this we invited 40 relevant influencers to visit the event in December. We worked with them to create bespoke content of the Firepit area and share our Southern Comfort cocktails with their fans. To broaden reach and relevancy further, we requested location tags and brand or location-based hashtags. This helped people planning to attend to know where to go.

As it was December, people naturally wanted to find somewhere warm to relax at the hectic event. Therefore, a photo with a cocktail and a fire in the background was a golden combination and really hit the brief. The best performing content incidentally also combined these two elements.

So what happened?

During the event, we used our owned channels to launch the partnership and geo-targeted a hero video at London only. We reshared some of the best influencer content and launched a real-time competition for people attending.

To maintain brand connection and extend the user journey for our influencers’ followers, we invited them to share additional content after the event. Via Instagram Story, they showed how to make the drinks served at Winter Wonderland. Doing this enabled us to show Southern Comfort as an accessible drink to be enjoyed out or at home.

Across the event period from the unique influencer audience, we reached 170K people, saw 30K engagements and 55K Instagram Story impressions. In addition, our owned channels reached 350K people with 30K likes and 840K impressions – 20K of those coming from organic Instagram Story posts.

Influencer posts also sparked heavy conversation from fans around drink inspiration, brand love and nostalgia, showing how the power of microinfluencers and their engaged communities can inspire further advocacy.

  • Account Manager: Xuan Vo
  • Creative Director: Alex Hill
  • Content Director: Adam Gordon
  • Senior Content Manager: Joe Moring
  • Videographer: Tom Stephens