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Arterra Wines
"GIPHY | Jackson-Triggs"
Bensimon Byrne
Jackson-Triggs was founded with a mission to make wine accessible to all Canadians. Yet, in 2020, Canada’s leading wine brand was struggling to connect with a new generation of consumers. As the brand looked to strengthen its relationship with Millennials, the agency dug into how they were naturally connecting with wine. They discovered that wine was playing a new role in Millennial lives as a social connector. So, when the pandemic forced socialization into the digital world, that’s where they turned too. What they found was disheartening.

The culture around wine online was too homogenous. Scrolling through wine memes, they saw animals and Muppets before a single person of colour. If Jackson-Triggs was truly going to be a wine accessible to all, they needed to increase representation and diversify the cultural objects surrounding the wine world. They set out to do just that. Their idea was to bring more diversity into wine culture by infiltrating online conversations with an entirely new, enormous library of social objects using an incredibly diverse cast of people.

They started with the hub of online culture, Giphy. The platform is naturally integrated into their target’s daily life, supplying the GIFs for top social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Slack. But Giphy is entirely organic. Getting their GIFs discovered was
essential to succeed.

The first part of their strategy was search optimization. They worked closely with Giphy to identify top trends and keywords to create content to ensure their GIFs would be discoverable. Then, they shot a library of nearly 200 GIFs featuring a diverse group of talent from a variety of underrepresented communities, including gender, sexuality, disability, and religion. They co-created and starred in GIFs that they actually wanted to use to promote shareability.

Finally, they drove their target to the newly founded Jackson-Triggs Giphy channel with paid and organic posts on Facebook and Instagram to extend reach. They embedded themselves in culture by surrounding moments of shared meaning, from The Bachelor to the Super Bowl, with shareable reactions. To reach a highly engaged audience, they partnered with influencers from various backgrounds to create and share their own GIFs as well.

Given that Giphy is an organic channel, their modest media budget under $100k had to work hard to drive engagement amongst the sea of over 10 billion GIFs accessed on the platform daily. Before they turned to paid support, they maximized organic success by working hand in hand with Giphy to fully understand their platform. They identified the most commonly known keywords both in and outside the wine category from ‘I’m fine’ to ‘give me wine’ and developed reactions that would be appropriate for each. This collaboration unlocked the opportunity to be among the first channels to launch Giphy’s new audio offering, Clips, which provided another organic boost in engagement.

The results blew them away. Within a week, their library of GIFs reached nearly three million organic views. At the time of writing, they’re at over 450 million views, but since this is an evergreen campaign, averaging 10 million views a week, their numbers are always out of date. Jackson-Triggs GIFs appear as top results for searches including ‘wine bottle’ ‘Salud’ and ‘Give me wine’ among many others, proving their deliberate keyword search strategy is contributing to success within the GIPHY algorithm for click score and popularity. Their top GIF (“it’s fine”) hit 20 million views in January after the US capitol was stormed, transcending the wine world and into popular culture.

The diverse wine GIFs weren’t just garnering impressions, they were being used. Collectively, the GIFs have been selected to share over 12 million times, an average of 2.2% engagement. Several individual GIFs have received over 20% engagement rate, 10x their goal. This means they successfully found a way to build cultural velocity and make Jackson-Triggs relevant enough to engage with. Most importantly, more Canadians can see themselves represented in online wine culture, taking another step toward a more inclusive culture to the real wine world.

Credits

Client: Arterra Wines Canada
Andrea Hunt – EVP, Chief Marketing Officer
Wendy Montgomery – Vice President Marketing
David Patton – Senior Brand Manager

Agency: Bensimon Byrne
Partner/Executive Creative Director: Joseph Bonnici
Chief Strategy Officer: Stefan Gerard
Creative Director: Gints Bruveris
Creative Director: David Mueller
Associate Creative Director: Lorne Covant
Art Director: Lorne Covant / Ana Segurajauregui Sanchez
Writer: Samantha Ramsay
Group Account Director: Laura Robinson
Business Lead: Aviva Togman
Project Manager: Efi Eman
Social Media Director: Kristina Kosa
Social Media Supervisor: Rebecca Milner
Community Manager: Persis Abraham
Producer: Katie Link

Production:
Director/Cinematographer: Darrell Wonge, represented by Fyfe Shader
Post Production: The Assembly
Editor: Mitch Finn
Editor: Mallory Robbins