Coors Light is sending Canadians on a treasure hunt this July with “Search+Rescue,” a contest designed to elevate summer from ordinary to amazing.
Visitors to SearchAndRescue.ca enter their postal code to find the location of 880 Search+Rescue boxes hidden across the country. The boxes – hidden in both urban and suburban locales – contain a variety of prizes including wakeboarding gear, invitations to Coors Light parties, gift cards and several grand prizes such as rafting trips and race car driving.
Locations of unclaimed boxes appear as red pins on a map while locations where boxes have already been found appear as grey pins.
When a box is located, the finder must tweet a picture of themselves with the box with the hashtag #searchandrescue and the box’s unique code. Coors Light will then send them a skill-testing question, which must be answered to open the box.
The Molson-Coors-owned brand is supporting the contest with a campaign of the same name, developed by its creative agency of record Leo Burnett.
According to Karl Bonar, senior marketing manager at Molson Coors Canada, the brand is sticking to its “Say Yes To Adventure” outlook, introduced in earlier work this year as a campaign designed to appeal primarily to millennials.
“The whole strategy is really about rescuing people from the everyday summer, and encouraging them to come and get out there and have a bit of fun,” said Bonar. “The Canadian way is to relax, chill and hang out on the patio; it’s pretty typical. So this is really throwing a curveball into that whole situation and looking to engage our customer in a fun, high-energy way.”
Elements of the campaign include online, experiential, and print ads running in the Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver editions of Metro.
“Search+Rescue” will culminate in August with “Base Camp Party,” a series of parties set to take place in nine major cities across Canada.
The campaign launched July 1, and will run until the end of the month or until all the boxes have been recovered. New boxes are distributed every week.
MEC did the media buy, and Behaviour is handling the experiential aspects of the campaign. Harbinger is in charge of PR, and logistical/executional support is being provided by Eventsing.
