Blogging for beer

Carlton & United Breweries (CUB) premium Italian beer brand, Peroni, has launched its own blog, Stile Italiano.

Creative agency, SapientNitro, has transitioned Peroni from a traditional marketing brand, focused on outdoor executions to drive reach, into a brand publisher driving its presence in digital via social media, digital displays with an Australian website.

The site’s aim is to become a resource and repository for the best of everything Italian, curated for Australians. The site was born when Peroni was looking to complement their ATL campaigns with digital led marketing.

SapientNitro’s relationship with Peroni spans 18 months, starting with the agency first managing the brand’s Facebook account.

“Over the course of 2014, we were able to hone in on what Peroni’s consumers were connecting with, and created a Peroni Nastro Azzurro brand book to tie in content with partnerships, influencers, and event amplification through social media,” said Dan Wilkinson, social media lead at SapientNitro.

“The amplification of partnerships like the Portsea Polo led to Peroni being the top performing social media brand at CUB in Q4 of 2014.”

The insight gathered from the social campaign proved that consumers had an affinity and were truly connecting to the Peroni brand in the digital realm. From this, SapientNitro explored a holistic website for Peroni, leading to the launch of the blog.

The first stage of the site sees the agency curating premium, stylish, relevant content from across the internet and Peroni’s partnerships (such as Jeep Portsea Polo), published on a daily basis.

Stile Italiano has been built to promote Peroni as a brand that brings style to beer, enhancing the brand name to consumers, and linking Peroni with a lifestyle that consumers can own – Italian style. The blog is primarily targeted at male premium beer drinkers who are fashionable, young, urban professionals, aged between 25 and 35 years old.

The second stage of the blog will commence in Peroni’s new financial year and will see the agency curating and creating authored content.

Craig Maclean, GM global brands at CUB  said Peroni is a relatively new brand for the Australian market.

“While it is big in Europe, it’s still growing in Australia. We’ve built a small, but strong and passionate following, which is continuing to see growth. We wanted to unlock the brand potential by building relevant online partnerships and content that our followers were keen to engage with,” said Maclean.

“SapientNitro has done a great job of guiding a premium brand like Peroni into the digital realm by developing content consumers are interested in. The launch of the Peroni Stile Italiano site is just the beginning. Our intention is to build on this platform further across 2015, and have SapientNitro continue to develop Peroni into a true digital brand.”