In order to tap into the annual fall angst around daylight savings and how much we’ll miss the evening sun, Labatt Breweries of Canada has launched an innovative contextual media campaign around Corona Sunbrew 0.0%, the brewery’s first-of-its-kind non-alcoholic beer that contains 30% of the daily value of vitamin D per serving. 

The “Missing the sun?” campaign activated on The Weather Network, Uber, Meta, and included a DOOH Union Station takeover and deskside sampling at select downtown Toronto offices.

The theme of the creative made the media strategy extremely time sensitive, notes Andrew Oosterhuis, VP of marketing for Labatt. 

“This campaign had to be quick and was locked by time relevance. Daylight savings only happens on one day and that initial feeling of missing the sun is the most impactful in the first week. Given this, we put a heavy investment in the five days following the clocks changing,” he tells MiC.

More specifically, Oosterhuis says the channels were key to the activation, because “we wanted to intercept downtown Toronto evening commuters during a time when they’re missing the sun most,” contextually targeting audiences on their phones as commuters check the weather, head to their trains or take an Uber home from work. 

Digital ads across The Weather Network, Uber, and Meta ensured downtown Toronto audiences were exposed to the brand while they prepped for their commute home, complemented by the DOOH Union Station takeover as the sun started setting increasingly earlier following the switch to daylight savings on Sunday, November 5.

As a non-alcoholic brand, “that meant we could explore sampling in a way we otherwise wouldn’t, encouraging trial in a new and tailored way,” Oosterhuis explains, adding that they delivered 58,000 desk-side samples around offices in the downtown Toronto core at 4 p.m. on Monday, November 6, the first day after daylight savings took effect.

“We have a relatively new innovation that uniquely aligned to a cultural moment, which was a natural integration for our brand. We seized the opportunity to intercept consumers in a way that was tailored to their behaviour and blitzed for a short, but impactful timeframe.”

Labatt worked with its media agency, Dentsu, across the various media placements.