Ben & Jerry's "City Churned"
Ben & Jerry's · The Social-First Era · ~2005 -- 2015
We invited people from 5 major cities to invent new flavors around the unique attributes that make up the character of their cities.
Votes within each city were automatically cast by the city's natural 'heartbeat,' or the everyday choices of its residents via their behavioral patterns in public transportation, photos posted, city traffic patterns and weather, and the people themselves.
In NYC, cabs traveling uptown counted as votes for Peppermint, while cabs headed downtown count as votes for Fairtrade Vanilla.
In D.C., every on-time Red Line and Orange Line Metro train counted as a vote for either Cherries or Fairtrade Bananas.
In Portland, votes were cast for either Marshmallows or Graham Crackers depending on whether a man walking through the door at Cartopia – the city's famed food cart pavilion – had a mustache or a beard.
We used video footage of these happenings and other quirks in each market, and leveraged the content within a larger digital media campaign used to drive people to the City Churned microsite, where ice cream lovers could track all of this in real-time, vote for, and even name their favorite flavors.
Big Fuel, then 360i, during the years social-first creative went from experiment to proven model. Oscar Mayer, Oreo, NOLA. Multiple Cannes Lions. The era that proved branded content could be culturally relevant, not just brand-safe.