Fifth Leg Wines approached Yield this spring to launch a new Australian wine into the Ontario market. Simple enough, except for the 29 other Australian wines being launched at the same time. Clearly, no new wine could succeed without standing out from the crowd.
In Australia, Fifth Leg has a well-established positioning – “Serious about wine. Not about life” – and a well-known brand character in Boris The Dog. The objective in Ontario was to target young working professionals, 25-40, who are adventuresome about wine and open to new brands in the $14-16 price bracket. Media dollars were scarce, so Yield developed a campaign that leveraged social media and grassroots tactics to drive web traffic and awareness. “With so many other brands competing for attention, we really needed consumers to remember our name and the dog character on our label the next time they were in the wine aisle,” said Yield Creative Director, Chris Torbay. “The best way to do that was give them something fun to do with the brand.”
Over 8,000 wine corks were printed with the domain name, www.dogtranslator.ca, along with provocative lines like, “What’s your name in dog” and “Arf out with your bark out”. Distributed in downtown Toronto by the Fifth Leg street team, consumers were engaged in conversation about the brand and encouraged to visit a unique Dog Translator microsite.
The Fifth Leg microsite did double duty, educating consumers about the wine – all barked out by Boris himself – while offering interactive engagement users could share. Type your name into the translator and Fifth Leg’s spokes-dog, Boris, barks out the translation “in Dog”. Users can then post the translation to Facebook, Twitter, or email to friends.
With a small budget, Fifth Leg was able to obtain 8,000 engaged brand impressions through the cork distribution, with a phenomenal 20% of those people later visiting the microsite. Of the unique site visits, 30% translated their name and posted it on Facebook or Twitter.
“We’re very pleased with results to date”, says Andrew Frost, Fifth Leg Brand Manager. “Fifth Leg Red is now the 2nd highest selling wine of the 30 new Australian wines launched over the summer. Since the microsite went live, the wine is selling 250 cases per week versus 70 when they first entered the LCBO in April.”
Yield also works with Porsche, Deloitte, Ontario Telemedicine Network, Richardson GMP, Alpha Trading, Treasury Wine Estates, Knightsbridge, Veisman Dental Centers and Hope Aero.
