[beer + social networking = more sales]

Coors sees social networking as part of a strong marketing strategy:


From the NY Times:

"BEER has long been marketed as a sociable beverage, from a campaign for Budweiser that carried the theme “When gentlemen agree” to the Löwenbräu jingle that began, “Here’s to good friends.” Now, another beer brand, Coors Light, is extending its presence in the new media with efforts on the social networking Web sites Facebook and MySpace.

The initiatives are part of a campaign known as “Code blue,” centered on a “cold activated” feature introduced last year on Coors Light beer bottles: the mountains pictured on the labels turn from white to blue when the beer gets cold enough to drink.

For instance, consumers ages 21 and older will be able to send friends “Code blue” alerts on Facebook.com, inviting them to meet up for a beer — a Coors Light, natch. They can even use Facebook maps to direct their potential brew crew to a nearby bar. The Facebook feature, or application, is scheduled to start early next week.

[...]

“We talk a lot internally about ‘360-ing’ our innovations,” said Andy England, chief marketing officer at Coors Brewing in Golden, Colo., referring to how executives there seek to use all forms of media to reach potential customers in a comprehensive, 360-degree fashion.

When it comes to the new media, “Everyone, particularly in offline businesses like ours, is still in a very experimental phase,” Mr. England said. “We, along with our agencies, are trying to learn what works best and expand on those ideas.”

For instance, “if you put a viral video out there,” Mr. England said, like the “perfect pour” clips posted on YouTube, “How long should it be? How branded should it be?”

“We place bets in the office about this stuff,” he added.

The Facebook application and the Coors Light presence on MySpace (myspace.com/coorslight453) are results of work that is coordinated among agencies including Avenue A/Razorfish, part of the aQuantive unit of the Microsoft Corporation; Draft FCB, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies; and the Integer Group, part of the Omnicom Group.

“In this new world we live in, it’s something we’re learning to live with,” Bill Lindsey, creative director for the Coors Light account at Draft FCB in Chicago, said of the cross-agency collaboration required for new-media initiatives.

The campaign started with a television commercial created by Draft FCB that shows a man in a bar sending “Code blue” text messages to his far-flung friends. Curious to learn why he is so urgently signaling them, they find him in a bar, eager to share with them cold-activated bottles of Coors Light."

More on the NY Times site.