Written for Influencer Intelligence
Marketers following Coachella this year have come to a consensus that natural soda brand Poppi ‘won’ the festival with its influencer marketing activation.
To mark the launch of its new lemon-lime flavour, the Poppi team decided to hedge its bets on one single influencer. Rather than indulging in multiple creator activities, it threw all of its budget into TikToker Alix Earle to carry its promotion. In a bold move from the growing brand, Poppi created its very own influencer house, jetting Alix and a group of her friends out to the property, which was heavily branded.
The green and yellow-themed house featured lemon and lime motifs, cushions, pool floats, deck chairs, umbrellas, wall art, bathrobes – you name it. Along with, of course, an abundance of Poppi sodas and merchandise. Not only did Poppi guarantee verbal and written promotion from Earle across her social channels, but a continuous stream of visual plugs.
Posting over 20 TikToks throughout the two-weekend festival, nearly every video featured a Poppi reference, from the influencer sporting a branded sweatshirt, to drinking Poppi cocktails in her kitchen, and name-checking the brand for providing her friends with branded soup cans to cure hangovers.
Each year Coachella is known to be a huge marketing moment. The Super Bowl for influencers, if you will, the desert is a hive for content creation and brand endorsement.
Poppi went all out with this immersive, 360-degree activation, not just with the design of the house itself, but with perks and incentives for Earle’s posse. It made custom T-shirts with their faces on them, and even provided them with relaxing facials. Dubbed #Coachearla in a nod to the influencer’s name, this was more than a collaboration.
Whilst each and every post may not have been labelled an ad, the resulting content successfully drove considerable engagement – reportedly driving more than 50m impressions in the first 3 days, and causing a massive 200% spike in sales over Coachella.
This GRWM video Alix posted received 10.3m views alone. In fact, every single video during the time period pulled in multiple millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes and shares.
According to Poppi founder, Allison Ellsworth: ‘Our goal was to make Poppi the must-have beverage of Coachella, and I'd say we accomplished that and then some…Coupling the debut of our delicious new flavor with Alix's infectious enthusiasm allowed us to really capture the spirit of the festival and drive incredible engagement with our target Gen Z and millennial consumers.’
On its owned channels, posts featuring the influencer pulled in above average engagement rates. This photo received 6,109 likes and 2,856 comments, giving it a 2.6% engagement rate, which is more than quadruple its average 0.48% on the platform.
While it has not been revealed how much the company spent on its Coachearla activation, nor how much it paid Alix for her involvement, there is no doubt the return will be high owing to the sheer volume of posts and variety of mentions produced. Rather than organising traditional spon con or ‘paid partnership’ labelled content, which would likely have had to adhere to the per post fee demanded by an influencer of Alix’s calibre (10.35m followers, 7.85% average engagement), the brand definitely secured more bang for its buck with its all-encompassing presence. And whilst campaigns featuring multiple tiers of creator may be a safer bet, particularly for a new brand, Poppi has shown fortune favours the brave, and in doing so, made a loyal brand advocate in Alix Earle for years to come.
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