Rocket Fuel, the brand of energy coffee owned by Food Brands Group (FBG), has launched a rocket into space as part of a £160,000 marketing activation.
The 28 foot rocket, built by UK firm Rocket-FX, took nearly a year to finish and has a wingspan of 8 feet. As part of the activity, Rocket Fuel found a campaign ambassador from a public search by placing adverts in newspaper classified sections for someone to be its very own ‘rocket man’. The chosen individual was 30-year-old Stephen Palmer.
The campaign took off with the placement of a 60-second cut of the video on social media, which propelled it to 189,000 views in the first four days. The second stage of the activity will see the consumer story pushed out to national newspapers, magazines and websites – as well as longer versions of the video, telling the story of the ‘launch’ from start to finish.
Rocket Fuel hopes that the wider campaign, developed by Forever Beta, will take off and help brand awareness reach new heights.
Niomi Taylor, marketing manager for FBG, said: “Rocket Fuel energy coffee is unique in the market so it made sense to do something equally as unique with this campaign. We have never done anything like this to promote Rocket Fuel before so we wanted to put some energy behind the brand.
“It was a wild idea but as we say in the video, why have wings when you can have a rocket? Our coffee is not for the faint-hearted so there was no reason why our marketing activity should be. Creating this video was the logical step for us given our name but no-one dared believe we’d actually build and launch a rocket.”
Matt Saunby, executive creative director of Forever Beta, added: “This was a golden opportunity to show you don’t have to rely on traditional media channels to reach large audiences anymore.
“The world has changed and you can achieve massive cut-through with strong creativity and an understanding of the digital landscape. We’re always aiming to push new boundaries at Forever Beta, so building our own one-man rocket and trying to get to space seemed like a great idea.”
Ben Jarvis, who built the rocket and runs Rocket-FX, said: “Despite the common joke, building rockets is actually rocket science. We build rockets commercially… name any science or stunt show and we’ve probably built something for it. We’ve created all sorts of crazy things like rocket-powered toilets, garden sheds and bicycle ejector seats but this was the heaviest and widest rocket we’ve done.”
Taylor continued: “As a challenger brand, we haven’t spent much on marketing before and concentrate on social media due to budget constraints and because that’s where our audience is.
“But we hope this video activity will reach a wider audience and show how we are a fun brand with a cult following. It very much matches our brand personality.
“Small brands such as ours should take more risks to get the message out there. Our coffee is seen as hardcore due to its much higher caffeine content and we’ve brought that into our marketing activity. What this campaign proves is that you don’t need millions to do something fun and ground-breaking to raise brand awareness. If this campaign really takes off, we’ve loads more plans for Stephen and for the rocket theme going forward.”
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