AdWeek
By Brian Morrissey, February 28, 2007
NEW YORK - Anheuser-Busch is bringing its "Here's to beer" campaign to social networking, but the brewing giant is skipping heavyweight MySpace for newer entrant MingleNow.
The company has kicked off a "Clink" promotion on MingleNow, a social network that only launched in December, which invites users to submit and share photos of them out and about "clinking" beer. It is meant to drive home the 18-month-old campaign's message that "beer brings people together," said Tom Shipley, director for global industry development at Anheuser-Busch, in order to set it apart from wine and liquor, which have been cutting into beer consumption in recent years.
"Our objective is to elevate the image of beer," Shipley said.
Rather than take that message to MySpace, which has an enormous audience with a large chunk under 21, Anheuser-Busch partnered with MingleNow, a social network that aims to connect people not through online profiles but through the places they socialize. On MingleNow, users show the bars and clubs they like to frequent, along with their social plans.
"You're not going to enjoy yourself on MingleNow unless you're over 21," Shipley said.
Because the site revolves heavily around bars, an overwhelming majority of its 300,000 users are between 21 and 35, according to Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of MingleNow parent BlueLithium. With the Clink promotion woven into the site experience, without overt Anheuser-Busch branding, users can view it as a fun feature, rather than a sales pitch, he added.
"It's a feature of its own on the site," Chahal said. "It's not an obvious home page takeover or typical ad."
MingleNow aims to have 2 million users by the end of the year. The site is an offshoot of BlueLithium, a San Jose, Calif.-based ad network that crafted the social network to add anonymous demographic and user behavior in order to improve its ad targeting on other sites. Chahal said once the site hits 1 million registrants BlueLithium's predictive behavior technology would be able to make the data a powerful targeting source for ads across the network.