Legacy perceptions and associations were holding back Stella’s growth within more affluent and fast-growing craft and premium beer audiences. To address this problem they created a Stella Artois Unfiltered. A more natural lager designed to appeal to consumers that care more about craft credentials, organic lifestyles and slower consumption.

First, they had to better understand this new audience and uncover insights to power creative briefs and cultural programming.

Finding the right consumer communities was the first step. Our AI captured millions of content engagement across relevant audience signals and identified x6 areas of cultural engagement to focus on. Evaluating brand fit and creative potential led us to prioritise x2 high-value communities to deep dive into. The combination of high speed AI insights across big data sets of content engagements, and the expertise of the Codec strategists pulled the right influencers, creative look and feel, and tone of voice for each community, to feed multiple activation briefs that launched Unfiltered in the UK.

Codec insights ensured Stella Artois were putting cultural intelligence at the heart of planning and activation. Building on the most successful category launch in 2022 - driving £14m of sales in the first 6 months - Unfiltered also achieved 10% YOY growth within community-led occasions.