Australian wine brand Lucky Penny is giving British Columbians the chance to send their friends well-wishes on a big scale this month with its Canadian launch campaign.

Melding traditional media with new media, ‘Share the luck’ allows consumers to create a good-luck message to a friend on Lucky Penny’s Facebook page and then broadcast it on one of five digital billboards in Vancouver.

The recipient can view the message before it’s transmitted, and then, depending on when it’s sent, it will appear on boards near the Lions Gate Bridge, Iron Workers Memorial Bridge, Burrard Bridge and Main St and Highway #1.

Lucky Penny is owned by Australia-based Casella Wines. The campaign was created by Open and media was handled by Wills & Co., both of Toronto.

The (almost) live-from-Facebook execution is a first for Astral, Martin Beauvais, partner, Open, tells MiC, saying that once everyone agreed on the strategy, there ‘was a lot of brain twisting involved’ in making it happen. But given Casella’s success with the launch of Yellow Tail in the early ’00s, which relied almost exclusively on pre-social-media WOM, the brand was keen to give it another go in the digital age with Lucky Penny, Beauvais explains.

‘Yellow Tail became a huge hit in the early 2000s, mostly around word of mouth,’ he explains. ‘So it’s a really important strategy for this client.’

The Facebook-to-OOH idea was born out of a desire to continue the WOM tradition, but also use Facebook in a way that honours its true functionality, bringing friends and family together, Beauvais says.

‘Facebook is only great when it actually does something for people, when it enables what people already do on Facebook, which is interact socially with their friends and family.

‘We wanted to make FB work for Lucky Penny,’ he continues. ‘This is the thing with social media – it has to work for the brand, but it also has to work for people.’

The campaign is set to run for four weeks.