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- [00:01]
Host
We all get a case of the Mondays. Sometimes. Coors Light created their own case of the Mondays for possibly the worst Monday of the year, the Monday after the big game. The case of the Mondays never looks so chill. So that is the case of the Mondays. Spot one of them from the campaign from Mischief that ran during the most recent Super Bowl 2025. And it was a brilliant campaign, as you would expect from Mischief. Very original, very distinctive, very completely unexpected. And the relationship with Coors is not just about the super bowl work. The relationship has been going on for the last four years or so. And we're going to talk about that work also, which involved a lot with Patrick Mahomes in the NFL. But fundamentally it is about the evolution of the brand. Where the brand has historically been about the state of the beer, it's now an evolution to about your state of mind. So you see that common theme throughout the work that we're going to be talking about today and what you've probably seen in recent years, and one example of this, which I love, is the slots, which was part of the super bowl campaign where we're seeing, you know, the personification of chill would be the slots. If you want to see the spot, you can check it out on our website@onstrategyshowcase.com, but I'm going to play a clip from it here. And it's really wonderfully reflective of how many people feel the day after the Super Bowl. Maybe they feel a little sluggish, maybe they're a little hungover, maybe there's some despair because that's the end of the football season. But the slots capture everything so perfectly. Encourage you to check out the spot itself and watch it again. My favorite part is when the slots are trying to run away from the police. It's not a high speed chase, it's a slow speed chase. Just phenomenally done. We are going to be at the FES. We are the official podcast partner of the Fes and excited to be that we're going to be at the North American EFFIE Awards Gala. It's coming up May 22, which is a Thursday, so that's only about two weeks away. If you're going to be at the FES, I would love to connect with you. We're going going to be doing some sort of short form interviews, like 10 minute interviews with a lot of the brands that are nominated that night. And we're going to be doing it before the awards are presented. So there's going to be some wonderful Tension in the room. So if you are going to be there, reach out to me. If you just happen to be there on the night, you can find us. We're going to be right off the main gala room. We have a room, a little studio off to the side there. You'll probably see some signage, and it'd be brilliant to connect with you and to maybe do a short interview about your brand and your campaign. So that's all coming up here. Back to today, we have got from Coors VP of Marketing, Marcelo Pascala. And we have from Mischief EVP strategy, Nemesha Jain. This is Coors Light. Enjoy.
- [02:58]
Marcelo Pascala
Monday, Monday.
- [03:01]
Nemesha Jain
Can'T trust that day.
- [03:07]
Marcelo Pascala
Monday, Monday.
- [03:09]
Host
Sometimes it just turn. Tomorrow we'll all have a case of the Mondays. So Coors Light made a better case to help you chill. Get a case of the Mondays. So I am excited to have this team together to talk about some great work that is happening in a category that is ubiquitous. And when you have that sort of pressure of being a category with so many brands spending so much money trying to make so much of an impression, you've got to be distinct and you've got to be different. So I'm excited to have Namisha, EVP strategy at Mischief usa, and Marcelo Pascoa, VP Marketing for Coors, both in North America and globally. Great to have you here. Welcome to both of you.
- [04:01]
Nemesha Jain
Thank you for having us.
- [04:02]
Host
So we saw the work. I mean, who did not see this work? It made a huge impact in the super bowl this year, all of the Coors Light work. But I wanted to have a conversation since we're really beyond the super bowl now in terms of the hot news worthiness of it, I wanted to have a broader conversation about the brand. So you guys were sort of gracious enough to come on and indulge me in some conversations about this, because we've had Sofia Colucci on the show, I think it was last year, and during that time, you guys were working with a good friend of the show, James Herman. And James wrote this great book called Future Demand, and he connected with you guys and you were working on some strategic projects together. And I was always curious how that worked out. So we're going to talk about that today. But I thought we could kick off first, Marcello, with the kind of a sense of the Coors business and where it stands today in the pack. Because it's a. It's a. It's a. It's a tough category, man. There's a lot going on and a lot of money spent yeah, it's a.
- [05:09]
Nemesha Jain
Tough category, but that's part of the fun in it. Right? I think that the. The. The brand made a lot of really visionary decisions throughout its jo, and that's why we are able to keep reinventing ourselves, but at the same time being very true to our DNA. So Chorus Banquet, for example, is a beer that is brewed only in Golden, Colorado. It is only brewed with 100% Rocky Mountain water. You know, like, that's what we call our legacy. So the brand is all about inspiring people to build their own legacies. And there is definitely a huge legacy for Banquet over the course of 150 years. And in the Coors Light was introduced later in 1978. That's when the premium light category started to exist, and that's when Coors Light was launched. You know, like, the brand is pretty healthy and still has such a fantastic role in culture.
- [06:05]
Host
Namisha, let's talk a little bit about how it's messaged now. I mean, you guys. I believe you guys have worked. Mischief has worked on the brand for four years. Is that right? Something like that.
- [06:14]
Sofia Colucci
Yeah, we have.
- [06:15]
Host
Tell us a little bit about how the brand has been messaged, because I always think. I think back to back in the day, Rocky Mountain High, Colorado. It was. It was. Everything was about. Was about chill. Everything was about the chill train and coldness and refreshment. How do you. How do you think about it?
- [06:35]
Sofia Colucci
Yeah, I think cold has always been kind of a truth about the brand, given where it was born in the Rockies. And, you know, if you go to somebody and ask them to crack open a Coors Light and drink it, and they're willing to tell you it's somehow colder than another beer. The mountains turn blue. So it's always been a truth about the brand, I think. How do you take something functional like that and turn it into something really emotional that connects with people? And I think that strategic shift to chill has been really fruitful for the brand. And a lot of the work, it's given the brand a compass for how to behave. Right. So we are the brand that, you know, encourages people to choose chill because we're made to chill, and we believe that chill is an act of choice. Right. So a lot of the work that we've done with Sophia and Marcelo has been really about demonstrating to people that essence of what does chill mean? What does choose chill mean?
- [07:38]
Host
If it was always about cold, did that just sort of. Marcelo, did that sort of run its course? Because there is this evolution that Nemesha is Referring to.
- [07:49]
Nemesha Jain
Yeah. So basically, coordinate has truly always been about code, Right. You know, like, that's what the brand has always been about. And in 2019, that's when we completely changed the positioning of the brand. And the idea behind it was exactly that we needed to find something that could perfectly balance the emotional refreshment with the physical refreshment. So up until, you know, like in. In the years before 2019, the brand was very focused on the physical code, the physical element of refreshment. Right. Refreshing people's bodies. But we wanted to be a brand that also refresh people's spirits, because those two things are very connected. Right. If you get home from work and maybe you've had a hard day and you want to take a bit to refresh yourself mentally and phys, you crack open a can of coarse light, if it is not really cold, you will not have that emotional feeling of release. So the physical cold is a catalyst to the feeling. So this new positioning that we called Meito Chiru was introduced by msj, who was then. She's our chief commercial officer, she was then our chief marketing officer, and she was the one who was leading that evolution. So it was basically going from the physical code to the perfect balance between physical and emotional. Right?
- [09:25]
Host
So this was happening. This is happening way before the James Herman work too. And with Sophia, then this was. This had already happened. Was that part of the pitch, Namisha, that were not the pitch, but the time that you started working with Coors Light was when this was when this new platform was introduced, or were you part of, as a planner, part of that process?
- [09:46]
Sofia Colucci
This is actually before my time at Mischief, I was actually at Leo Burnett and they kind of worked on that. I think the play on words too, is really powerful because chill is definitely when you hold a beer, you feel the chill, but it is a feeling. And I think that unlocked a lot for the brand because it gave, like I said, a brand, a compass for how to behave. And it. The messaging again became more than just, we're cold, cold, cold to wear cold beer, that enables a transformation in your spirit in how you feel in the situation. I feel like in general, if you look at the last three decades of beer ads, right, and it's a lot of hardcore party, party, party. And I think what was starting to shift was if you actually look at how people are drinking beer and when they're drinking beer, they're actively choosing beer and especially Coors Light to turn off, right? And we thought there was something really interesting in this idea of like, there's power in sort of opting out of the mayhem and choosing Chill. And I think that sort of was an interesting thought for us because not only did it reflect how people were actually drinking this product, and it felt like there was a cultural truth to people needing to turn off a little bit and wanting to, you know, actively choose chill. So I think that definitely became, not only was it inspired by culture and real consumer behavior, it just felt like Coors Light especially had the right to kind of play into that.
- [11:41]
Host
We'll be right back. Want always on brand metrics that deliver Value to stakeholders this episode is brought to you by Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable and always on brand tracking tool that helps consumer marketers and agencies answer the question. Is what we're doing working? A not so secret fact is that companies pay $100,000 or more for brand tracking, which is out of the question for many modern brands whose budgets are under pressure. Tracksuit provides enterprise level brand tracking without the big price tag. Their in house research experts do the heavy lifting, using best in class practices to craft and launch your survey and get you results fast. Tracksuit is fast becoming the common language for marketers and agencies to measure and communicate the value of brand building. Check it out@gotracksuit.com that's gotracksuit. Now back to the show. I've mentioned this a couple of times on the show in the past, but I'll mention it again here because it's relevant. I've noticed that you guys, Marcelo, haven't abandoned the chill train. I remember when I worked on the Mazda business a number of years back, it took probably five years to convince Mazda to just move away from Zoom Zoom. They wouldn't do it. And I think in my opinion, it hurt the brand for many years as it tried to move further upscale. So do you still see that the Chill train, which is that big silver train that appears in many commercials, is that just one of those distinctive brand assets that you feel you can't and shouldn't let go of at this point? Or how do you look at the role of a sort of a. I suppose it's a brand icon, not an icon, but it's a brand asset at this point.
- [13:35]
Nemesha Jain
Yeah. So it's interesting that you're asking that because just to clarify, the train wasn't the chill train until last year's super bowl campaign. Right. People called it the silver bullet or slide train that a lot of people knew and loved, but it wasn't about chill. It was truly about the physical code. When we brought back the train for super bowl last year. That's when we renamed it the Chill Train. We are not focused on the train anymore. And that was always the vision, you know, like, because we were bringing the train back, we would allow it to run its course, to complete its beautiful journey. But, you know, like, if you take a look at the campaign that we are airing right now, it doesn't have the train in it anymore. It was very successful for us, but it was always the plan to move forward. Precisely. Precisely. Because right before the train came back, we evolved made of chill into what we now call Chill's Chill.
- [14:41]
Host
With this new lens on Chill, you guys have, you know, taken and interpreted that in a couple of different ways. One of them is in the world of sports. So maybe we start there with some of the work that people might be familiar with. Tell us where the whole Patrick Mahomes work came from and this sort of filter as, you know, the more chill way of approaching the NFL rules.
- [15:03]
Sofia Colucci
I'm not the biggest sports fan and even I know who Patrick Mahomes is, which is amazing. And the great news was like, you know, the team came to us in a brief saying, man, Patrick Mahomes is like a huge fan of Coors Light, right then this is not just any other football player. He's a two time super bowl champion, multiple mvp, multiple, you know, winning face of the NFL kind of star. So it, it felt wasteful to not use it. So we, we knew the problem was that technically NFL rules say that their athletes cannot advertise beer, right? And that's always been the case. So the question was, you know, if, if we can't, if Patrick Mahomes can advertise Chorus Light. And the problem, the bigger problem behind that is Coors Light is a beer. What if Coors Light was not a beer and that became kind of the provocation to the team? What if it was something else? And as a brand that is chill and that chooses Chill, we could take it in a lot of fun ways. It gave us permission to have fun with the problem. And that's when they, you know, the saying goes, the obstacle becomes the way. And that's really what we did with it. You were like, let's have fun with the fact that he can't advertise coarse light, but maybe he can advertise coarse light as in a flashlight. And it didn't just stop there, right? Like year after year, we've kind of taken that trope and hacked it in multiple ways. The second year was all about he can't sell beer, but maybe he'll hang out with his best friend Bear, which is a big burly bear. And year three was, you know, and this one I think was one of my favorites, which is we can't really air an ad with Patrick Mahomes, but what if we shot an ad and actually aired it after he retires? So. And you know, Marcel and team worked on this very closely with our team and we actually put the ad in a time capsule. So we just had so much fun with the problem itself.
- [17:28]
Marcelo Pascala
This summer, we tapped star quarterback Patrick Mahomes to be in a promo for Coors Light. Turns out we overlooked the fact that he can't actually promote Coors Light.
- [17:37]
Host
It's a flashlight.
- [17:38]
Marcelo Pascala
That's right. It's a flashlight, not a beer. Introducing the Coors Light. Coming in at 12 or 16 fluid ounces, nothing beats the sturdy feeling of the Coors Light in your hand. The coors light is 100% flashlight and 0% adult beverage. It's perfect for camping trips or those warm summer nights spent with great friends. The Coors Light is made with high quality steel so it feels cold as the Rocky Mountains.
- [18:05]
Host
To user random analogy, it's a quality flashlight.
- [18:09]
Marcelo Pascala
This summer, sit back, chill and crack open a the Coors Light. Get your the Coors Light today@the coorslight.com while supplies last. All proceeds go to the Fifteen and the Mahomes Foundation. Coors Light, the official beer of everything unofficial. Recently, we tapped star quarterback Patrick Mahomes to be in a promo for Coors Light beer. Turns out we overlooked the fact that he can't actually promote Coors Light beer. That's why we're proud to introduce Coors Light Bear. Coors light bear is 0% adult beverage and 100% mammal. It's the perfect bear to hang out with after a long day. Few things are more refreshing on the golf course than Coors Light Bear. Not the same thing as beer. Coors Light Bear is pure mouth and cold refreshment, which is something you would totally say about a bear. Coors Light Bear is perfect for the beach, but you've got to be careful because not everybody likes bear on the beach.
- [19:11]
Host
Coors Light Bear, the world's most refreshing bear. Here you go, my man.
- [19:17]
Marcelo Pascala
Visit Coors Light Bear.com and get a Coors Light Bear of your own. All proceeds go to 15 and the Mahomes Foundation.
- [19:28]
Host
Let's talk now about the Super Bowl. So the super bowl this year, it. It felt like a bunch of disparate pieces that all came together ultimately at the same time. And it started that first Monday with that posting in Times Square. Tell us about what were you guys Inside Mischief thinking of? Were you deliberately trying to weave together sort of different concepts? Like, for example, what I mean by different concepts would be that slots didn't feel like the way things kicked off. I mean, slots came later. But tell us about what you were thinking in terms of the entire super bowl experience.
- [20:06]
Sofia Colucci
Honestly, it started with a brief that came from the Coorselite brand team, which was, look, this is a big beer brand and it needs to attract the broad audience. Super bowl obviously makes so much sense from a media stage. It is the biggest media stage out there, but it's also a huge beer drinking occasion. Right? And it's an opportunity, unlike some of the other brands that are just there to be there to take advantage of the 127 million people watching the broadcast. We were also there to sell beer and really galvanize and energize the system and make sure the beer gets on the floor and generate that energy around the brand leading up to the game. So the brief was, yes, we want to have a killer spot that absolutely crushes game day, but we want a bigger idea that can really start to see the brand and culture leading up to Super Bowl. And it all started with a very simple idea, right? And the idea was this insight that we've all felt, which is, man, the Monday after Super bowl just sucks, right? You're. You're partying with your friends, you're watching the game late, and no one in general Monday suck, but the Monday after Super bowl sucks pretty bad. And this was a really fun thought, but what do you do with that? So. So if we are a brand that's all about helping people choose chill, how do we chill out the most unchilled day of the week and probably of the year. And our creative team had a brilliant idea around, you know, what if we actually chilled it out with a literal case of the Mondays and that became the heart that drove everything. So it might seem like disparate pieces, but everyone, you know, every little piece was actually born from this notion that Mondays are the worst day of the week. And the Monday after the super bowl is probably the Mondayest Monday of all.
- [22:22]
Host
Made famous by that movie Office Space many years ago, when the receptionist said to the guys, do we have a case of the Mondays?
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Sofia Colucci
Somebody has a case of the Mondays.
- [22:32]
Host
It's a great character in that movie. Yeah. And I think when I say that it was disparate pieces. I think that's a good thing, because if everything looks and feels the same too much, there's a tendency to ignore it. But when you're able to connect those dots in your own mind and everything comes together perfectly, I mean, for example, the first few elements, which was the Times Square misspelling the typo in Mountain Cold Refreshment. When I saw that first, I was thinking, you guys are going to do something with referees, because it was spelled referencement or something like that. And then there was the press release that afternoon that announced it as being a typo, which obviously most people, Most intelligent people recognize it as being, so. And then you announced it as being this sort of a case of the Mondays, and that played. That played out, and I think you pretty much edited it on. Was it each Monday leading up to the game?
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Nemesha Jain
Correct?
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Sofia Colucci
Yeah. Basically the idea drove the comm strategy, and it was, how do we take every Monday leading up to game day and bend it to the will, of course, Light. Right. So every month, Monday actually became an opportunity for us to seed a Case of the Mondays in culture, to make it part of the vernacular. And the best way to launch it was, what if we had a Case of the Mondays and we team thought of a lot of different ways to have a blunder, and it was very much staged. There are still people out there wondering if we made a mistake, and just then two days later came up with a case of the Mondays. It was very much a staged typo. We do know how to spell, guys. Yeah, but. But it really was about, you know, let's very intentionally put this mistake out in the world and let the Internet simmer on it and tell us we made a mistake and then say, oh, guys, sorry, we had a case of the Mondays. And guess what? To chill it out, we're going to launch our own Case of the Mondays. So every Monday just became an opportunity for us to do a mini brand act. That all led up to this crescendo of, hey, we had a case of the Mondays. And now we've launched this Case of the Mondays to chill out your Case of the Mondays.
- [24:54]
Host
So, Marcelo, is all of this work presented to you in at one time, these series of Monday activities, or was it through discussion that each of those stages ended up getting sort of clarified because you did want to hack the pregame?
- [25:09]
Nemesha Jain
What we had in the beginning, the nugget that was always there, was this idea that people have a case of the Mondays after Super Bowl. Let's launch a better case of the Mondays. A Case of the Mondays that actually brings you chill instead of taking chill away from you. Right. So that's what we always had. Everything else. Mischief is such a creative powerhouse. And because the nugget was so strong, long, the more we talked about it, the more ideas were coming up. Right. That's when you know that you have something powerful. When you start with a nugget and then the executions, it just keeps flowing and flowing and flowing and flowing, and it all feels connected.
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Host
But did slots come early or did slots come late?
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Nemesha Jain
The slots came pretty early on, but the original nugget was, let's bring chill to the Monday after Super Bowl. But by last, a better case of the Mondays that came first.
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Sofia Colucci
Yeah. And the idea didn't depend on slots. Right. Like, that was. The thing is, we actually had multiple ways of executing that thought. Slots just happened to be the most sticky and interesting. And what we felt, it felt the most magnetic and unexpected because that's the other thing with the super bowl is everyone has a celebrity or multiple celebrities and, you know, bells and whistles. And I, you know, how do you deliver the essence of this idea in 30 seconds in the midst of all this noise and all the star power? And it just felt like a very kind of disarming and immediately captivating and humorous way to grab attention.
- [26:57]
Host
Yeah, it was brilliant. I mean, that spot, to me, I can. I can definitely say it was one of my favorites from the super bowl because it really was sort of personifying fans the day after super bowl, and it played out, I think, really perfectly. Do you do more with. With. With slots? Is that. I. I know that sounds like. Because it's a great. It's a great idea. They're great characters. They work really well. You'd almost want to see them come back. Marcelo. I mean, is there talk about some way of doing a 2.0 with those guys?
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Nemesha Jain
Well, I'll never say never to anything, particularly to sloths, because sloths, at the end of the day, the other reason why sloths were so perfect, yes, they are endearing. Yes, everybody loves sloths, but they are the epitome of chill. Right. We are unfazed by the world around us, and that's the definition of being chill, you know, like, it's being unfazed by the crazy world around us.
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Sofia Colucci
We do have the sloth suit, I believe, from the shoot. Marcel.
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Nemesha Jain
My own. I've been. I've been. I've been proposing that I wear that suit to, you know, like, this big distributor convention that we have. But Vincent has already Told me. Vincent, partner in crime from our comms department, told me, it's too much even for me because I'm always willing to make a fool of myself. But he said that, you know, like, yeah, yeah, like at some point you have to stop. So that's why he drew the line.
- [28:29]
Host
So, Namisha, I have one final follow up for you. I'm feeling that slots came first. And then everybody was like, love this, love the theme, love how it connects in with the platform. What else do we do? And then the other ideas were brainstormed for Wakdam came earlier or did the early come first and then you. I mean, how did it roll out? Because I think a lot of people will be thinking that this feels like it happened over, as Marcelo said, a period of time rather than a single moment.
- [29:00]
Sofia Colucci
So we treated it as a campaign, and as one does with a campaign, right. Once you have the heart of the idea, the core idea, a bait, which in this case was, we're going to launch a case the Mondays. And we knew we wanted to do this actual case at scale. So I think that's another kind of beautiful thing about this was like, the Coors light team actually changed the packaging. And this wasn't just a limited run of 100 packs that you can get on the website. There were 1.8 million cases actually on the floor, retail floor. So we knew that we needed to drive people to go get these cases and get them to retail. So it very much was intentional in the sense that we knew we needed a beautiful execution for the day of the Super Bowl. But how do you then try to get people to a understand what is case of the Mondays? Why the hell are we even doing that? And then get them to go to retail and pick that up? So it was actually very intentional to say, all right, so how do we even explain to people what a case of the Mondays is and what we mean by it? That's why we did the blunder. So people are like, what. What is wrong with Coors Light? Why are they doing this? Oh, because we had a case of the Mondays and now we're launching one. Okay, now I get what the case of the Mondays is. And then it was just a steady drumbeat to get people to keep remembering the case of the Mondays and go get it at retail. The call to action in everything that we did was go go get your case of the Mondays. So it was actually very intentional because we always saw this more at more than just a fl in a pan, 30 second, you know, spot. We saw it as a campaign and treated as such. And that was the brief to the team and everyone from media to PR to the Mischief Team to Molson Coors Social Team. Like, we were all in it together. And we actually sat down and laid out the key beats of this rollout. So this is what we're doing in Beat one. We're going to mess up and this is how we're going to respond to it in Beat 2. We're actually going to do something. Buzzy the Roller came later to remind people what Case of the Mondays is in Beat three. We're actually going to have someone famous have a case of the Mondays. We didn't quite know who that famous person would have been at that time, so the details got fleshed out later.
- [31:50]
Host
And that was Timothy Simmons, the actor from Veep.
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Sofia Colucci
Yeah, but the framework was there and, you know, we colored in the details.
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Host
Later and was slots there early.
- [32:02]
Sofia Colucci
I think it might have been the third, second or third. We had three different film treatments and this was one of the film treatments that we had shared with you.
- [32:12]
Host
Yeah. So great. So great. It is Namisha Jain, EVP strategy for Mischief usa. She's based here in Chicago. And it's Marcelo Pascal, VP Marketing and Cors Global in North America. Thank you both for sharing this story. The work is fantastic. You gotta do more slots. I'm gonna listen. It's not S L O T s, it's sloths. It's just great stuff. Really good. Thanks. Thanks for being with us and we appreciate having you share the backstory.
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Nemesha Jain
Our pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [32:43]
Host
And we will see everyone on the next episode.