By Alexander Lee • October 3, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Instead of hiring an agency to manage its latest ad campaign, the whiskey brand Four Walls took an alternative approach: hiring its community.
Four Walls is launching a promotional merchandise line today emblazoned with rose imagery inspired by one of the brand’s fans, Emberlin Leja, who wrote to the company to share the story of her 97-year-old grandmother, a lifelong bartender named Rose.
To collect materials for the advertising campaign, the liquor brand — which is co-owned by “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” stars Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton and Charlie Day — partnered with the tech platform Adim to dole out prizes totaling $44,444.44 to digital creators who sent in their favorite bar stories, with the explicit goal of using those stories to market Four Walls. For her story, Leja received a prize of $600.
“There were humorous things, heartfelt things, short form and long form video — all kinds of content,” said Four Walls head of marketing Ashley Purdum. “But there was just this beautiful essay about this person’s grandmother being a bartender, and it was like, ‘OK, this is what our brand is all about; we need to do something bigger with this one.’”
Following its call for fan-created content, Four Walls now has a bank of user-generated materials that Purdum plans to use for additional marketing campaigns and activations in the future — and the brand spent less than $50,000 to get its hands on that content. All creators who submitted their materials via the Adim platform, which is also co-owned by McElhenney, signed a licensing agreement that makes it straightforward for Four Walls to use the IP.
“I learned about Adim through Rob’s socials and really took an interest when the Four Walls collaboration was announced,” said Leja, the creator whose grandmother inspired the merchandise drop. “It’s not an easy feat, especially if you don’t have connections, to get your work across the desk of someone who has the influence to turn it into something tangible or make it better. This campaign offered me that opportunity.”
Adim approached Four Walls’ call for fan-made content as a beta test, made easy by Rob McElhenney’s co-ownership of both companies. But based on how this test run went, Adim co-founder and CEO Melissa Kaspers is confident that the approach could work for other companies, including more mainstream, non-celebrity-owned brands.
“When I think about the ‘right brands,’ I don’t think it’s necessarily a celebrity brand. I think it’s brands who think about storytelling, and I think most brands aspire to do that — that is the thing that helps them to connect with consumers,” she said. “A lot of brands have leveraged influencer marketing to try to do that, and I think this takes that one step further.”
In a marketing landscape in which marketers are increasingly stressing the importance of building community, brands don’t necessarily need to be aligned with celebrities to have dedicated fans or inspire user-generated content. One goal of the Adim platform is to make it simpler for brands to connect with these fans — and to more easily take advantage of their work for marketing purposes.
“We think about brands and IP sort of in the same vein. It could be Nike or Gatorade, or it could be Deadpool, right?” Kaspers said. “The goal is to build and grow the community around these IPs and these brands, and I think there’s a huge opportunity, because people are already doing this in some way — they’re just not really as incentivized to do it.”
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