Industry
Beverage (Alcohol)
Challenge
As a sponsor of select AFL and NRL teams, the Bourbon and Whiskey brand needed to show clear allegiance to its clubs. At the same time, the brand wanted to own broader footy occasions nationally, without alienating fans who didn’t support those teams.
Objective
The objective was to strengthen cultural relevance during footy season while driving measurable brand lift across key audiences.
Key Product
Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Dynamic creative, POI Targeting
A dual-creative strategy built for culture
Rather than relying on a single message, the Bourbon and Whiskey brand deployed two
distinct creative roles through programmatic DOOH, each designed to do a different job.
Generic footy creative: built for scale
- Broad messaging celebrating shared footy rituals and mateship
- Activated nationally during peak match windows (Thursday - Sunday)
- Delivered across high-footfall environments
This creative positioned the Bourbon and Whiskey brand as the drink for game-day moments, driving everyday relevance and mass recall.
Club specific creative: built for loyalty
- Team-specific variants aligned to sponsored clubs
- Activated only in postcodes where those supporter bases live and move
This hyper-local approach built emotional resonance, signalling to fans that the brand understood their club identity.
Why programmatic made it possible
Through Vistar's DSP, the Bourbon and Whiskey brand was able to:
- Run dozens of localised team variants nationally
- Dynamically align creative to supporter geography
- Layer proximity targeting around stadiums, pubs and bottle shops
- Manage multiple media owners and formats within a single coordinated buy
This level of localisation at national scale would not have been feasible through traditional out-of-home. Programmatic enabled depth and scale to work together not compete.
Measuring the impact
To understand the distinct role of each creative pillar, Vistar partnered with On Device to verify exposure at the respondent level.
Using device-level exposure data, we were able to:
- Confirm which individuals saw the brands DOOH ads
- Identify whether they were exposed to Team Creative or Generic Creative
- Segment respondents prior to conducting the Brand Lift Study
This methodology allowed us to isolate the impact of each creative type, not just measure the campaign as a whole.
Two creative roles. One holistic outcome.
Generic creative drove scale
- +5pts unprompted awareness
- +7pts prompted awareness
- +4pts consideration
- 90%+ brand clarity
Strongest performance on sociability and mass recall among footy audiences.
Team creative drove depth
- +2pts brand preference
- +13pts among NRL fans
- +10pts among women
- +6pts among bourbon drinkers
Strongest uplifts were seen in trust, favourability and "brand for me" metrics — reinforcing emotional alignment with club loyalty.
A smarter way to activate culture
By layering national saliency with hyper-local allegiance, the brand achieved:
- Above benchmark lifts in awareness and consideration
- Improved brand equity among core fan segments
- Strengthened cultural relevance during footy season
Generic built reach and recall. Team built trust and preference. Programmatic DOOH enabled both to work together, delivering a full-funnel brand outcome at national scale.
