Virtual Bartender

Background

Virtual Bartender is an online video feature that allows visitors to interact with a beautiful barmaiden (Playboy Model Tammy Plante). When Tammy recognizes a request, such as "pour me a beer," "dance on the bar" or "fight like a Jedi," she happily carries out the task and then returns to her idling position to await your next request. There are over 100 different actions and thousands of different words and phrases that she will react to.

The Results
Launch - Thursday Nov. 4, 2004 (between 9:00 p.m. and Midnight Eastern Standard Time) 10 emails were sent out to friends of beer.com from our office to beta test our “Virtual Bartender”. No other form of marketing was used and there weren’t any links from our home page or any other sites. No search engine marketing, banner ads or offline media have been used to promote this piece – its success is purely VIRAL.

Day 1 - Friday Nov. 5
More than 15,000 sessions. The first “Fan Forum” appeared from the UK where young DJs talked about the commands they discovered.

Day 2 - Saturday Nov. 6
Sessions began doubling - 30,000. More “Fan Forums” appeared around the world (Holland, Italy, Japan, USA)

Day 6 - Wednesday Nov. 10
Over 500,000 sessions! We had not even put it on our home page yet. The only way to get the Virtual bartender was through forwarded emails and the increasing number of 'Fan Forums' appearing in search engines.
• Average length of visit: 7 minutes
• Page views: 7,980,000

By day 28 the site had reached 10 million sessions.

Awards: Virtual Bartender won 'best interactive viral' at the 2004 Viral Awards.