Smirnoff nightlife exchange – we were there!

The campaign leading up to London's Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange event included TV and digital promotions, a blogger outreach programme, an owned mobile channel (Smirnoff. Mob), 14 national PR initiatives and a global partnership with MTV. Smirnoff engaged consumers by asking them what their ideal night out would be. The initial TV advertising called for people to go to Facebook with their ideas for a nightlife exchange and the experiential tour of a Big Brother-style mobile diary room encouraged party goers to describe what they thought was best about their local night scene. Each country’s chosen curator then went through the ideas and selected some of the most highly-rated suggestions to create a culturally-authentic night out.

Waiting in the queue outside in 2 degrees wrapped up with my scarf, gloves and hat, I found it hard to imagine how I was ever going to feel like Smirnoff had brought Miami to London. They had definitely forgotten about bringing the weather!

As we entered, white-suited promotional staff handed us our wristbands and welcomed us to ‘Miami’ with a booklet of vouchers to exchange for a range of experiences once we were inside. They included free drinks and other giveaways designed to encourage you to fully explore the event. We had the choice to hang out in Havana with the Cuban music, sporting our newly acquired Havana hats, or go down to Miami beach and get our sunnies, hot dogs and a massage by the virtual pool. Not to mention the opportunity to join the crowd for DJ sets by the awesome Zane Lowe and Jaguar Skills - just two of the 5 acts providing entertainment on the night.

There were also interactive kiosks in every corner of each room, which had unique radio frequency identification technology where you could swipe your wristband to automatically ‘like’ Smirnoff on Facebook. As we passed the main bar area, where they were selling Miami mules, mojitos and various other Smirnoff concoctions, staff walking around with iPads encouraged us to swipe our wristbands to ‘like’ the individual drinks they were serving. This was a great way to tie an experience born from Facebook fan involvement into an offline mechanic, and encourage real-time ‘likes’ from people while they were enjoying the experience. The only problem was, the server was down from about 10pm onwards and it didn’t go back up. Fail.

As an integrated campaign, my feeling is Smirnoff could have further capitalised on the digital activity. The kiosks were cool, but there was nothing which really integrated fan feedback at the event. They could have had a live feed showing tweets/posts as they happened. They also seemed to miss an opportunity to cash in on the appeal of the other nights. What was the point to running all of the events on the same night and ‘exchanging’ nightlife when we knew nothing of what was happening in our sister country?

Since the event Smirnoff has received some negative feedback on their Facebook page surrounding the queues for drinks and the cloakroom. However, they have dealt with the negativity extremely well, replying to everyone on an individual basis - displaying excellent community management.

Overall, it was a terrific experience, it was a great night out, and I will definitely be saying ‘I was there’.

This blog post was written by Gemma Nugent

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