Jim Beam Highlights Aging in Bourbons, Consumers with “Beamfire” Social Game

Earlier this year, Beam Global Spirits & Wine launched the Jim Beam Black Label variant under the campaign slogan “Eight years Changes Everything”, highlighting the variant’s eight-year aging—twice as long as JB White Label.

Now the bourbon manufacturer is underlining that product difference with a Facebook-based game that asks players how they’ve matured during the last eight years and what from their past they’d choose to throw onto a virtual bonfire, or “Beamfire” in exchange for a chance to win $8,000.

While visitors can learn about the game from a Web microsite they need to log into Facebook to play the actual weekly game via their Facebook account. Once they do, players, will be able to upload images of items they want to discard from their past and can earn badges and drawing entry points for throwing them on the virtual fire.

From now through Dec. 10, Jim Beam will suggest weekly themed discard “challenges” such as “my old wardrobe”, “my musical tastes’ or “my former job”. But in fact players can also earn sweepstakes entries and social-game points by throwing out their own personal memories or outdated beliefs, expressed in either photos or in written text.

Hosting the game on Facebook offers several advantages, according to Rob Mason, director of US bourbon for Beam Global. For one thing, Facebook profile data can be used to make sure that registered players really are of legal drinking age before letting them into the game.

Using Facebook as a game platform also lets players post their participation and the content they decide to incinerate to their wall page and broadcast to their friends list—but only if they give permission to do so. That should help the “Beamfire” promotion gain some viral spread.

Registered players and general visitors can go to the Web site to view items the community has thrown into the flames for that week’s challenges and for past ones. They can also see a leader board of point leaders for the weekly challenge and for the overall contest.

Game play and winning is a hybrid of weekly drawings for prize packages, ranging from ballcaps and barware to Jim Beam director’s chairs and billiard sets, and the points and badges familiar to players of Foursquare and other social games. On the sweeps sided, entrants earn points for signing up, for throwing up to eight items into the fire per day, and for completing the weekly challenges. Each of those points earned during the week will convert into an entry for the weekly drawings; the total of points earned will be the player’s total number of sweepstakes entries for the final grand prize drawing on December 10, for one of the three $8,000 awards.

But by using a more social approach, Beam is encouraging players to send news of the game out to their social graphs. Players can also earn weekly points (and a “kindling” badge for their Facebook page) by inviting eight friends to join Beamfire in a week. Once each during the game period they can also earn points and badges for getting eight friends to play the game simultaneously while logged into the Web site, or getting 16 friends to do so. Finally, they can earn points and one “Fire Captain’ and “Fire Chief’ badge by posting eight or 16 burned items respectively to their Facebook wall.

The demographic target for the campaign is specifically young men 30 to 34 who are beginning to realize that they have to shed their hard-partying young man ways and transition to a different, more sophisticated type of enjoyment. That audience also helped pinpoint Facebook as the proper arena for the promotion.

“One of the challenges you face from a brand perspective is around the balance between getting people to come to a particular Website versus putting your content where they are already living,” Mason says. “Facebook is a vehicle where our target consumer is going on a regular basis—in many cases several times a day—so it’s a much more effective way to drive the viral component of this campaign.”

By using a microsite to explain the game and then tapping into the Facebook social grid for spread, Mason say, “We feel like we have a perfect combination: more control over our programming on the microsite side, but ensuring the word gets out by using Facebook.”

Postings to the gallery portion of the microsite are moderated to ensure appropriateness, and done only by permission of the player.

Mason says that social campaigns will play a growing part in Beam’s promotional efforts going forward, in large part because customers experience the company’s products in a social way. The Facebook page for Jim Beam Black Label] currently has 55,000 likes.

“Consumers tend to have an emotional connection with spirits brands,” he says.”As a result, we have a product that consumers really want to talk about and have dialogue around. The new vehicles out there, whether Facebook, Twitter or any of the other emerging social media platforms, provide a great forum to enable our advocates to have conversations around the brand.”