Dave Mead, chief marketing officer and co-founder of the Austin, Texas-based sparkling mineral water brand Rambler, thought he had landed on the perfect social video idea.
The plan was to outfit an old Jeep with the water brand’s logo and current tagline (“Chug Life”) and send it soaring off of a cliff in Glacier View, Alaska, as part of an annual Fourth of July car launch, recording the whole thing for social media. The hope was to make something entertaining enough to gain enough attention online and grow the brand’s social following while boosting brand awareness as Rambler moves into more markets nationally.
Leading up to the event, Mead said, he was feeling nervous about what might go wrong.
“I had butterflies because we only get one chance,” Mead told Marketing Brew. “What if there’s a clog in the fuel line? What if it dies and it just coasts over that thing and then just rolls down and is anticlimactic? Everybody launching a car there has the same dream and the same vision of launching their car farther [than] anybody.”
The Jeep didn’t end up going farther than anyone else’s car that day, and it didn’t end up soaring over the cliff at all. Instead, the car veered left and drove straight into two trees, taking them down—and, with them, Rambler’s carefully laid social content plans.
“I just thought, ‘I cannot believe we just spent months planning and preparing and spent all this money getting up here, and I have no car launch,’” Mead said.
The team didn’t linger on the failure for long—when they returned to Texas, they pivoted to sending water as part of relief efforts for the July 4th floods in Kerr County, Texas. After a few weeks passed, though, the team revisited the footage and tried to figure out if anything was salvageable.
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Instead of chucking it altogether, Rambler’s marketing team ended up releasing the failed car-launch video. To do so, Rambler partnered with a viral fail video page, Send It, which has nearly 800,000 followers on Instagram, to spin the brand’s marketing failure into the social moment Mead wanted.
The team eventually recognized “that we were sitting on some gold,” Mead said. “There were 38 cars launched, 37 of them were successful, and they’re all the same. They’re all similar. Ours was unlike anyone else’s.”
Rambler is primarily focused on event sponsorship to get its cans of sparkling water into the hands of potential customers, and it’s using the moment to boost digital marketing efforts like it had initially planned—with some additional changes. Rambler paired a giveaway with the release of the car-launch video, offering those who like, follow, tag friends, and share the video a chance to win a free trip to Alaska for two and $500 worth of gear from Send It—to help boost interest in the spot.
“The intention was to go create some wild content, but not just let it live in our feed,” Mead said. “We’re gonna go create something cool, something wild, that people are gonna want to see, and that’s going to increase our following.”