Iced coffee is more popular than ever, but people aren’t making it at home like they do hot coffee. In fact, cold drinks represent 75% of Starbucks café sales—yet only 20% of At Home cups are consumed cold.
Why? Many consumers (including 4k+ Reddit posts) simply find making cold coffee at home an intimidating, borderline extreme activity, struggling to replicate the café taste and experience.
Our objective was to address misconceptions and show consumers just how easy and delicious our new at-home cold coffee products are to make.
For years we’ve seen and heard “don’t try this at home” whenever we turn on the TV. So, when Starbucks wanted to give people the confidence to make their iced coffee at home—something that’s, contradictory to popular belief, super easy and risk-free—we dared to say the opposite.
To get our extreme(ly chill) message across, we partnered with the king of “don’t try this at home,” Tony Hawk, to flip the script and for the first time in his career—actually encourage people to try something at home.
How? We took America’s most recognizable daredevil and showed his chill side. Leveraging Tony’s legendary influence, we created engaging videos and social content to highlight the convenience, ease and taste appeal of Starbucks new at-home cold coffees—juxtaposing it with his usual extreme stunts. We conducted eight earned interviews and showed up big on owned Instagram and TikTok channels, with paid amplification behind all of Tony’s posts to maximize engagement, encouraging coffee drinkers to literally “Try This at Home.”
In the end, we stuck the landing. By leveraging Tony Hawk’s cultural caché to show that making super good iced coffee is super easy with Starbucks at-home cold coffees, we successfully demystified the process, addressing misconceptions and positioning Starbucks Coffee at Home as the go-to brand for your cold coffee needs.
With Tony’s help, we drove significant incremental sales ($5.7M+*), conversion (37% on Amazon), reach (2B earned media impressions and 68.3M social impressions), and brand lift (25% increase in Trust as compared to the previous cultural campaign) among target consumers. We also secured feature coverage from Tony’s interviews in a diversity of major publications like Forbes, Elite Daily, NBC News, GQ and BroBible, and a highly syndicated interview with iHeart Radio’s On With Mario Lopez. Pretty cool if you ask us.
*CM3, Edelman’s solution to link PR and influencer investments to sales.
