#FriendsAreWaiting: Budweiser uses Promoted Video to share responsible drinking message with millennials

A new incarnation of the beloved Budweiser dog, first featured in the brand’s 2014 Super Bowl TV commercial, has appeared — this time, on Twitter.

The yellow Labrador Retriever plays a role in #FriendsAreWaiting, a Promoted Video campaign against drunk driving. The 60-second video quickly captured the attention of Twitter users, receiving more than two million views within days of its release on September 19.

Brian Perkins, VP of marketing at Budweiser, described #FriendsAreWaiting as very successful. “This was one of Budweiser’s most effective campaigns to date,” he said.

Budweiser chose to share #FriendsAreWaiting on Twitter because millennials, the brand’s target audience, frequently access the platform on their smartphones to discover and share new content. ”Above all else, we wanted to be where our consumers are, so sharing the video on Twitter, a mobile-first platform, made sense,” explained Perkins.

The goal of the video was to encourage responsible drinking. “Our intent was to create compelling, emotional content to drive adults to make a plan to get home safe and to really understand that the decisions we make — good and bad — impact the people (and pets) we care about most,” said Kathy Casso, Anheuser-Busch’s VP of Corporate Social Responsibility.

According to Perkins and Casso, the key to making #FriendsAreWaiting effective was creating an appealing story that viewers would be eager to share.

“We know that on Twitter, once certain topics or pieces of content pick up momentum, they spread across the platform very quickly,” Perkins said. “As this campaign indicates, sharing content using Twitter’s native video player can be a very powerful tool when executed the right way.”