0:05 Good morning, Samantha. Hello. Hi. Welcome, everybody. 0:17 Hi, Katie from Colorado. Great to have you joining. Yeah. We'd love to hear where everyone's from. Quick intro. 0:25 Oh my gosh. Two Colorado folks? Wow. Wow. Oh, hi, Lindsay. Hi, Lindsay. That's so exciting. 0:34 Lindsay's one of our names, so thank you for joining. Oh, amazing. Tara from Texas. I'm from Austin, Texas as well. 0:44 And, also, Samantha lives in Texas. Yes. As well as Texas people speak up in New Jersey because I'm from New Jersey. Love that. Representation from everywhere. Hi, Sam. 0:54 Hayes from Dallas. Hi, Phoebe. We've got Pennsylvania, Iowa. Wow. The whole contiguous United States and Canada. 1:03 My goodness. Linley, I know you, Linley. Hi. Great to see you. And Sweden, my goodness. So glad all of you have joined. 1:13 Thanks so much for introducing yourself in the comments. We're really, really excited to speak with you all today. Now that it's been about a minute or so and some people are coming in, let's go ahead and get started. 1:25 So welcome, everybody. I'm Audra Fields from the team here at Bizarre Voice. I lead client partnerships and their social commerce strategies. 1:34 I'm also thrilled to be hosting today's session with Samantha from Bacardi talking all about Bacardi's creator marketing playbook, and they've made some really amazing strides in retail digital shelf transformation. 1:48 So as we all know here, modern shopping behavior, it's shifting rapidly. It's hard to keep up with. So while discovery often starts, nowadays, even on ChadGBT or Claude or, of course, social feeds like Instagram and TikTok, purchasing products in many categories still relies a lot on retail shelves, both digital and in store. 2:10 And so today, we're diving into how Bacardi brands bridge that gap by turning social inspiration into actual measurable retail demand by using creators and shoppable technology in partnership. 2:23 So I'm joined today by Samantha Landry from Bacardi. Samantha, welcome. Could you introduce yourself and your role at Bacardi? Yeah. Thanks, Audra. Hi, everyone. 2:32 Thank you so much for having me. I hope this is gonna be super useful for everyone across all industries. My name is Samantha Landry. 2:40 I am the senior manager of digital shelf and omni growth here at Aucardi. I'm actually nearing my five year anniversary. Yay. So my role is super cross functional. 2:51 I work across all of our incredible brands, media, the shopper marketing and teams, all just to support our national accounts. 3:00 Awesome. Happy five year anniversary almost. Thanks. Time flies. So let's get to it. Samantha, to set the stage here, the market landscape across regulated spaces, especially like AlcBev, it's been changing. 3:15 It's on the edge of this new normal. So we've seen a unique cocktail, so to speak, of slow growth but fast shifting consumer habits. 3:24 So in spirits, for example, we've seen Gen z. They're drinking less than millennials did at their age. But when they do buy alcohol, they're looking for novelty, aesthetics, premium quality, a connection with someone that they trust, this kind of real experience with it. 3:41 And, of course, as shopping is done more and more in online spaces, whether that's e com sites or retail sites to social, to even agentic shopping nowadays, Brands traditionally show sold exclusively, like, in brick and mortar or just non d c at retailer really having to pivot. 3:58 So there are a lot of new challenges that brands are having to get creative to address. And because of all of these shifts in the market landscape, retailers are not taking big gambles anymore. 4:09 They really want solid proof of consumer demand before they actually commit that precious shelf space to an actual brand. And so speaking of all of these challenges today, Samantha, what would you say were the specific challenges that Bacardi brands were running into before this creator playbook kind of came into play, so to speak? 4:29 Yeah. So it's a great question. So in our industry, most of the sales still actually happen in store at the physical shelf. However, more than 60% of people research alcohol online before actually making the purchase, whether it's online or in store. 4:44 So Bacardi, it really meant that the traditional advertising wasn't driving the immediate retail action that we were looking for and that our retailers were looking for, to be honest. 4:55 Because Spirits is highly regulated, and our retail partners wanted to understand how we can generate that digital buzz and translate that into actual store traffic during key seasonal moments for those accounts. 5:08 So our goal was to tap into the emerging social trends, like the rise of the Hugo's Spritz cocktail and at home entertaining and convert that into consumer interest that actually drove traffic to our retail partners. 5:20 Yeah. Makes total sense. And then to add complexity to your challenge you just described, because alcohol is famously complex and highly regulated, on social media, there's so many regulations for how alcohol brands can advertise and connect with folks and really lean into that buzz you're describing. 5:40 So you need to figure out how to generate buzz with these social trends, like the Hugo Spritz, while working around all these regulations. But the challenge that you're describing, it also resonates far beyond spirits and lots of industries. 5:53 So whether you and the audience, you're working with pharma or beauty or CPG or really any brand, driving online interest to physical stores or retailer ecommerce, that's, like, the universal challenge. 6:06 And making the most of the power of social trends to generate that traffic can be tricky because of those regulations I mentioned, but especially because of how quickly social moves and because you really wanna connect with folks authentically, which is very much an art. 6:21 So I'm really excited to share or for you to share more on how you all really address this and and leaned in. But before we jump into the how and how the Hugo Spritz creator campaign actually was executed, I wanna take a step back, and I wanna mention how often brand leaders view creator marketing strategies as one of two extremes. 6:43 So it can either be, and most frequently it's seen as, a top of funnel PR buzz kind of move or a lower funnel performance move in the context of paid ads. 6:55 But Bacardi Brands took a much more connected approach to bridge that gap through the shopping funnel from buzzy awareness to product consideration and then conversion. 7:04 So, Samantha, how did you and your teams conceptualize that more connected strategy to solve the industry wide challenge you were speaking about? 7:14 And then also get brand and retail marketing teams working hand in hand to execute it. Yeah. I love that question because it can definitely get kind of muddy when you're working with a bunch of different teams on the marketing, the sales, the PR front. 7:28 And PR has always played a very important role in creating that initial cultural buzz and that brand awareness that our brands truly need. 7:37 They use macro influencers and large lifestyle voices to create demand at the top of the funnel, but PR alone doesn't always carry that demand through to the purchase. 7:48 So my team saw an opportunity to build that conversion layer underneath it. So while PR creates that demand, our creator strategy helps turn that demand into actual retail traffic. 8:00 The key difference here is we work with micro creators across hosting, lifestyle, mixology. And rather just focusing on impressions, we actually measure ads to carts, keyword growth, placement shifts on the digital shelf, and other conversion signals. 8:18 Ultimately, that strategy creates a shoppable bridge between brand awareness and the digital shelf. So we're actually moving consumers down the funnel and closer to purchase. 8:29 I love that distinction and how this is laid out on this slide. So Pr creates the spark, and then NRS, like your team, kind of stokes the the flames that turns that inspo into retail action. 8:42 And it builds that bridge, like you mentioned, or that pathway through that shopping funnel. So from a Bazaar Voice perspective, this is where we see so many brands unlock real growth. 8:54 So when you're able to make creator content actually shoppable, not just living on social as an awareness play, but really drive sales, you aren't just or you aren't changing the creator's freedom or anything. 9:06 You're really just giving a motivated shopper a very frictionless path to move from that looks amazing, like, an Instagram reel to add it to cart on Target or Walmart or actually on the the little conveyor belt in store at Total Wine and just a tap or a quick drive. 9:25 And so that's what ultimately translates social sentiment into that retail shelf transformation. Exactly. This is actually what helps create, like, make our PR investment actually work even harder. 9:38 Once we show retail partners that our social campaigns are driving that high intent shoppers to both their digital and physical shelves, it completely changed the conversation we were having with our buyers. 9:50 That's the strategy that actually came to life during our summer Hugo Spritz campaigns the last two years. And that brings us to the execution part. 10:00 So how did we actually put this strategy into action? So to put this strategy into action, you really learned and to create or leaned into creator partnerships on both Instagram and TikTok, specifically around Saint Germain and then these seasonal hosting occasions. 10:16 Could you walk us through how you all brought that to life? And what made you all go for this occasion focused content when you're structuring the program? 10:26 Absolutely. So instead of running just traditional recipe videos like you you see a lot on social media, we actually focus on real life meal planning moments that our retailers really wanna see. 10:39 So think of, like, a girls' night in or just like a seasonal holiday party with cocktails added. Through Bizarre Boys creator marketing, we were able to partner with lifestyle and hosting creators to develop content that actually felt real authentic and very relatable. 10:56 The right mix of creators and the recipes help introduce shoppers to more of our entire portfolio, not just the campaign we were running at that time. 11:05 But the real game changer was actually making the content shoppable. I cannot stress this enough. So with one click recipe links used on our Instagram and TikTok posts, consumers can actually add all the ingredients to their cart at any of their preferred retailers within a 10 mile radius of them. 11:24 I love that. That is key exactly as you said, and I love this content too. It's so engaging. It feels so real and makes me want a cocktail right now. 11:35 It's 05:00 somewhere. So can you elaborate on how the actual execution of this worked behind the scenes between Bacardi and Bizarre Voice? 11:45 Yeah. I mean, it really felt like Bizarre Voice was an extension of our team. We talked with our dedicated influencer marketing manager literally multiple times a day. 11:54 They help us diva identify the right creators, align everyone on the campaign brief. We manage the process from start to finish. They also helped ensure every single piece of content we put out was approved, brand safe, and completely compliant to our industry. 12:10 We really loved partnering with you all on this strategy and Loved it from beginning to end and seeing it all come to life. As many folks here in the audience know, marketers often struggle to prove the ROI of creator content beyond likes and impressions. 12:26 We've already spoken about that with the funnel. We spoke about this with shoppable links, as Samantha mentioned. So, Samantha, could you talk about what you thought were the key commercial results of this campaign and then how you actually measured them? 12:41 Yeah. So we had great success with our fierce Hugo's sprint campaign last year. It reached over 260,000 Instagram users. 12:50 We had 6% add to carts, and 62% of all of those clicks actually went to our priority retailers, which is just incredible. 13:00 Most importantly, and I encourage everyone to do this, use third party research. So a Profitera, whoever you use for your digital shelf analytics, because it actually showed that our Saint Germain product moved 20 positions on target.com. 13:15 So going for from page two to page one in two categories in just a couple weeks. I mean, it's incredible. We reached the number one ranking for elderflower liqueur across Walmart, Meijer, Instacart, Total Wine, and Specs, and I'm sure many others that we we we can't we can't measure at the time. 13:37 But that level of digital shelf growth completely changed the conversation with our retail buyers. Seriously huge. 13:46 Like, moving from page two to page one on a major retailer in two weeks by proving consumer demand, that's that's amazing. 13:55 So shoppers, especially Gen z, use social media to discover products, become more familiar and connected with brands like Saint Germain, and ultimately make purchase decisions. 14:07 So according to a recent payments intelligence report, 81% of Gen z sometimes or often make purchases based on influencer recommendations. 14:17 And this really speaks to the power of social commerce through creators, which you all really got to see through this campaign execution as well. So, Samantha, looking back at all this success kinda from end to beginning, what would be your key advice for brand teams who are looking to replicate this, what we might call creator to commerce sort of model in their own categories? 14:42 I think there's really three takeaways here. I think the first would be design for purchase intent from the start. So creator content shouldn't just build the awareness like we spoke about before. 14:54 It should actually drive consideration and conversion, so you have to make it shoppable. Those links are so key to the success of this campaign. 15:04 Second, connect the content something genuinely useful or do occasion shoppers usually care about? So talk to your retailer partners. 15:12 What are the occasions that are super important for them? And adopt a strategy based off of that. And third, use the conversion data to show retail partners how the campaign connects the entire omnichannel journey. 15:25 So it's just not from a digital point of view. It's the entire journey. And what are the elements that actually helped that journey? Was it retail media? 15:33 Did you have in store programming during that time? It's the complete journey. It's just not one channel now. I love that. Makes so much sense. 15:42 It also gets everyone in the boat with you at your brand to see the value to these campaigns and get buy in to run more of them. So that's super astute. Thanks so much, Samantha. 15:54 Very valuable insights for us all. This brings us to the end of our fireside chat or session, though we will take some q and a if anyone has questions. 16:05 If you wanna take these learnings even further and master how to win, both shoppers and also how to win with AI, join us in a city near you for inspire twenty twenty six. 16:17 This is Bizarre Voice's flagship event. It's It's all about the art and science of product discovery this year, and you can register today. And if you'd like to explore how to turn creator inspiration into retail demand for your brand, just like Samantha did with Bacardi, you can reach out to the Bazaar Voice team. 16:34 And thanks so much for tuning in. Again, if there's any questions, we'd be happy to answer what's on your mind. 16:42 And I can see in the q and a section right now, Jade has asked if we could send a playbook on this. So the recording of this webinar should be available afterward. 16:52 You can definitely take a look at it, and those slides we shared will be included as well. We also have a Bacardi case study or success story with the Sarvoys, which is linked in the docs section, and that really laid out how this was executed and the kind of results that came from it as well. 17:07 It's a great question, and thanks for for leaning in. Any other questions we have? 17:26 I think we just made so much sense, Samantha. Think we're as a result. Exactly. Now it's about getting out and doing it. Absolutely. 17:37 That's the that's the hard part, but Bazaar always is here to help as well. It was so great to see all of the results that you guys got from this campaign. 17:45 And, of course, we're running more campaigns too, so more success. We do have one question here from Jill, and this will be a question for you, Samantha. 17:55 Do any of your retailers allow you to drop a pixel pixel on their site for reporting? Because I think this is leaning into the notes you had about Profitero understanding measure conversion. 18:04 That is a great question. The answer is no. I think once we get more comfortable these sharing these results with our retailers, we can certainly make a case for asking that question. 18:16 You definitely want some level of comfortability with your buyers before you go, obviously, like, asking for the world. But I think that's a great question because, of course, like, the retailers that are not measured by, like, a Profitera or whoever you use, for digital shelf analytics, that would be the way to get those metrics for sure. 18:39 And then kind of a follow-up question to that from Susie. She was curious. How did the retail partners react to that campaign performance? 18:49 Yeah. So for Target, for instance, like, we showed them them these results after after our initial campaign last year. 18:58 So it's it's literally a part of all of our in store programming pitches now. They act very well to it because they want to see us create that demand for in store and online traffic. 19:10 And this influencer marketing is just another lever that we're using in conjunction with retail media POS. Everything that you guys put together for your pitches, this is just another strategic lever to add, bring traffic to their sites and the in store. 19:29 And speaking of, this is also, kind of a natural follow-up to that question as well. Ken was asking if you all also use Bizarre Voice to generate ratings and reviews for retailer sites for those products that you were supporting through these campaigns. 19:45 Yeah. Absolutely. Luckily, Bacardi has just really amazing brands, not to, self pitch. So we already have, like, a a robust ratings and review, organically, but we do use it for a lot of our innovation products. 20:02 So it is super important when you're launching a product at any retailer that you have a breadth of ratings and reviews ready to go soon or after your launch period. 20:14 So, yes, we definitely do that for every single innovation item at Picardy. Love it. And then we also have a a slew of questions that are more about strategy with execution with influencers. 20:27 Sure. So we have some questions about how did you decide how many influencers to partner with? How did you think about the style of influencers you're working with? 20:37 So micro versus nano, etcetera. I know that you worked directly with our influencer marketing manager at Bazaar Voice who really led you all through. 20:48 She would actually find and kind of vet the creators on your behalf, and you would work together to move forward with them. But I would love to hear your thoughts on your strategy there. 20:56 Yeah. As far as how many creators we're working with, I take it from, like, do we have in store programming during that time period? 21:04 Do we have media running during that same time period? And their strategy really follows that. So I'll dedicate the most influencers to those time periods and fill in the gaps for other key key consumption moments at retail. 21:18 And it's just budget. So you set a budget, and that really depends on your number of creators you would get because they all charge different prices. 21:27 Right? And as far as, like, the how we determine to use micro versus maybe, like, a nano or a macro, micro is actually seen to get the most engagement. 21:39 So that's what we're sticking with. We've done crazy good results, obviously, from our Saint Germain campaign and the other campaigns we've run throughout the last year, year and a half. 21:51 So that that micro creator is really working for us right now. Awesome. Yep. I think it's been working so well. And, eventually, maybe with other brands under your portfolio, maybe a different community will work really well. 22:04 But micro is just super effective for what you're doing today. And then someone was also asking, like, what made you select the influencers that you did? 22:14 So that also goes back to Bazaar Voices services where we have a dedicated influencer marketing manager who's there to work hand in hand with your brand, And they will take your brand's guidelines, such as Samantha, thinking about, like, the kinds of creators That you want to work with who really focus on hosting, for example Yes. 22:33 Or Mixology. They'll take those guidelines and source high fit creators for you across the platforms that you care about, surface them up to you, and then you can vet them together to make sure that they are on brand and brand safe and really creating the kind of content you wanna work with. 22:49 So our team will take guidelines and source creators for you and then kind of run the actual negotiations with the creators, the actual, you know, going back and forth on content submissions and make sure to to run all the the tricky stuff for you. 23:04 Right. And I just wanna, like, ping on the importance of our hosting like, choosing a hosting creator. 23:13 Maybe, like, someone that does, like, a lot of tablescapes for, like, Halloween, holiday, that kind of vibe really translates well into those those actual solid retail moments where people are looking to go to, like, a Walmart or a Target, Albertsons, and really shop the entire basket. 23:36 And that's what we want to show through our creator marketing. Like, this is a basket building moment, and you can actually get your entire meal, your appetizers, your desserts, and your cocktails in one place by shopping the link to add to cart. 23:51 So it's really great that we choose we're choosing influencers that can naturally adopt that. I love basket building. I'm getting hungry again. 24:01 I mentioned I wanted a cocktail earlier. Now I'm wanting a whole spread. I want a charcuterie board. Yeah. We also had a question related to that too. 24:10 So to follow-up on this occasion led creator content we just mentioned, like, maybe we're hosting for Thanksgiving or the Super Bowl or the US Open, did you ever try any campaigns to make more evergreen content that you could repurpose more in the future, or did you really keep it focused on seasonality, holidays, and it being a more singular in time campaign based content? 24:35 Yeah. We did actually. So we actually ran a campaign for our premium rum last year. 24:44 Still a very successful campaign. It was around holiday time, but it really was kind of evergreen content. 24:52 So we have run those type of campaigns. I can actually argue for, like, a lot of our Saint Germain campaigns can be season seen as an evergreen meal planning moment as well. 25:02 It isn't always about an outdoor picnic or by the ocean or any anything that's, like, very, very summery. 25:12 We wanna show the versatility of this product so it's not always, like, a very zeroed in. Here's a summer moment. It's more of just like an entertaining and a hosting moment. 25:24 I love that. Super smart. Pivoting a little bit from the specifics about the content style or the creator that you're working with, a slightly more zoomed out strategic question, which is at the top of our chat. 25:40 How did you balance the PR influencer program and then the NRS influencer program? This is definitely in reference to the funnel side we looked at earlier. 25:49 So you want your conversion as high as possible. You don't wanna come off so salesy. You also and with that, you wanna keep engaging content. 25:58 So what was your frame of mind around that? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. And when I say the the the waters get a little muddy, they definitely do. 26:08 But, again, the key difference with us is when you see a piece of the Hugo Spritz content, for instance, it does not scream Saint Germain anywhere. 26:18 It's simply an added context or we're just highlighting the bottle. But she the but the creator's actually going through the whole meal planning moment. 26:28 They're highlighting the entire meal, not just the Saint Germain. So it's it's very relatable. It's super authentic, and it just just doesn't come across very sales y compared to, like, one of our maybe our influencer campaigns at the US Open where we are hiring a very high ticket macro creator to go to the influence US Open and have a honeydews. 26:53 It it's it's very different content for two very different purposes. Yeah. Makes total sense. 27:02 There's a couple more minutes, and so maybe we can do one or two more questions. I'm sort of sorting them thematically. 27:12 So we may actually rewind a little bit and go back to some of the thoughts about strategizing for the campaign in the first place and how it's executed. We have quite a few questions about this. 27:23 Let's see. Let's see. Did you notice specifically more success when it comes to conversion on TikTok campaigns versus Instagram campaigns? 27:35 So we measure it's a interesting question because we did measure this campaign by campaign, and we've only been doing TikTok for the last since this year. 27:45 So we have a couple campaigns to measure against. It's like, Patron did good on Instagram, but, oh, wait. Grey Goose did good on TikTok. 27:55 So it just it depends on the brand. I think we need a couple more years of a case study to put together to really deter determine if one over the other. 28:06 Because, really, it looks pretty evenly matched right now compared to, like, all the campaigns we've run this year with all of our brands. Yep. That's really a good question. 28:16 And then a a simple question to answer with that. Did you repurpose the same content between Instagram and TikTok, or did you keep that separate? 28:25 Yeah. We repurposed, but we also used a lot of the same influencers from campaign to campaign too. So if we like someone doing what they did for Hugo's Spritz, we made someone do it for Picardy Halloween too. 28:36 So that was really a good thing we did with we managed with Bazaar Voice as well. Definitely a best practice. 28:45 So keeping track of what kind of impact specific users have in order to continue to build relationships with them and keep contracting with them is such a a great move. 28:56 And we do have insights provided with these campaigns from our end that help you understand, like, which handles are really generating engagement, views, click throughs, depending on what services you're using with our links or or whatever vendor you may be working with. 29:12 And then combined with the kind of data that Samantha's team is getting through Profitera really paints a picture of which creators are building the most impact for your brand and then consistently working with them on and on from there. 29:24 Alright, everyone. We have about thirty seconds left. There's some more questions in the chat. We'd be happy to follow-up with more info afterward. 29:33 If your question wasn't answered, you can always reach out to the Bazaar Voice team, and we'll chime in with some insight. Thank you again so much, everyone, for joining, and thank you, Samantha, for joining us as well. 29:42 It was great to learn from you. We hope everyone has a great rest of your week. Thanks, everyone.
