Svedka Vodka wants to help millennials have a good time. Over the past four years, its high energy campaigns have led the brand to exceed category growth and gain awareness with its target market.

However, Svedka needed for millennials to choose its vodka during high consumption periods such as Memorial Day, and, most notably, Halloween.

During the Halloween season, the company set out to scare millennials by leveraging their online behavior, tracking where they spend the majority of their time. Innocent vodka drinkers were ‘cursed’ with a cookie and continuously haunted and followed by creepy retargeting banners for the duration of the campaign. The brand’s banners were creepy – stalking internet users, reminding them that their every move was being watched, measured and weaponized for advertising.

The curse could be broken by visiting the brand’s site and sharing the only thing more despicable than that of retargeting banners: click-bait social articles.

To bring this to life a list of triggers was created so that headlines could be developed against site placement ads. These included day-parting, location, device, even things they’ve posted or commented on their social based on active listening tools. The idea itself was simple enough, but took unprecedented cross-departmental collaboration to pull off. Breaking down silos and approaching the challenge made what would have been good, great.

Campaign engagement of sharing content (‘the curse’) from the hub increased over ten times during the two-week campaign period. Overall CTR: 0.47% vs. and an industry benchmark of 0.10%.