For OPEN Wines, targeted at the urban millennial, we were tasked with a sponsorship program for consumer-facing events. As avid event goers and planners, we immediately knew the challenge - guests rarely know what brand of wine they’re drinking at open bar events. And we wanted to avoid the typical logo banners and bar signage. 

So we made a game out of it.

We branded a set of OPEN wine glasses with funny and interesting words. Every time a guest got a new glass, they’d receive a new word. Our hunch? That thanks to the presence of social media and capturing moments, millennials would instantly be intrigued to create sentences and have fun with it. And we were right. So in every photo, where someone was holding a wine glass, there was OPEN wines.

Then it was time to host our own OPEN Wines event and for this, we wanted to give it a social feel from the start, with a new approach to the invitation. Rather than sending out the same old email and image, we took the conversation online. Has anyone ever been invited to a party via Twitter before? We didn’t think so. We took the idea to our digital dev teams in-house where they created a Twitter tracking tool that allowed us to invite people to our party via Twitter. The tool also allowed them to continue the invitation process by inviting a plus one via Twitter as well. The entire domino-style process was tracked via a website where we watched the magic unfold.

Each time an RSVP came through, we would program a RFID bracelet with the attendee’s name and Twitter handle. Upon arriving at the party, each guest would receive this bracelet and was told to grab a glass of wine and visit the Bird Box. We also tagged each glass of wine with its contents.

At the Bird Box, guests were asked to place their bracelet and the tagged wine glass on a programmed box (which we developed in-house) and instantly they experienced a social miracle. Reading their Twitter handle and their varietal type from the wine glass, the box would tweet at the guest (from the OPEN wines account) and direct them to another experience at the party or tweet the details of the wine they were consuming.

The result - young people were sampling and engaging with a wine brand in a non-intrusive way that was relevant for them.