Southern Comfort: 100 Proof and 100% Online

Ad Age recently reported that liquor marketer Brown-Forman has decided to shift all of its $10 million media marketing budget to the onlineworld. Last year, nearly 75% of that budget was spent in print and cable tv, where they were so much competition that they were often being played in the same tv ad pods as their competition. It’s not every day you see such a drastic change in marketing strategy – especially from a company with a $10 million marketing budget.

Bold move? Maybe. The right move? Definitely. Southern Comfort is targeting the young legal drinking age crowd – 21-29 year olds. This audience is now more influenced by the internet than they are print media or cable tv. While their competitors continue to hammer away at each other using traditional media, Southern Comfort will separate themselves, better target their audience and engage them online in a way you can’t engage an audience using traditional media. Even better, if they do it right, they’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of their marketing and make quick adjustments based on almost instantaneous feedback – something it can take weeks or months to do using traditional media.

Marketers who aren’t looking very closely at online marketing strategies are missing the boat. The under-30 crowd all grew up online. It isn’t a “new” media for them … it’s where they’ve been spending their time for the last decade. Think about this … if you wait another 5 or 10 years before developing online marketing strategies, half of your market will have grown up in an online world.

Marketers who don’t start embracing the online world beyond just having a website will soon realize that they’ve missed a whole generation of potential customers who spend more time with things like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter than they do with newspapers, magazines and tv. Just because you don’t know how some of these things work or you don’t use them doesn’t mean your potential (and often, most influential) customers don’t.

Author: Tom Flynn III

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