THE SUPER BOWL OF BREWING.
The Great American Beer Festival (GABF) is the beer industry’s biggest bash. Put on by the Brewers Association it brings a sea of 60,000 hop heads to downtown Denver every year. Taps flow and bottles clink as enthusiasts explore thousands of offerings, milling about the city’s convention center and its surrounding bars.
GABF came to us because they wanted to create an exciting digital experience that would engage attendees of this busy event. The solution needed to work on two levels: it had to elevate fans’ experience at the festival, but it also needed to drive their engagement before, during after the three-day annual celebration. Partnering with GABF we asked, what if we could create a mobile app that would extend the offline experience fans already love to an engaging mobile experience that add real value for fans before, during and after the event?
SAILING A SEA OF SUDS.
Live events can be overwhelming—even for the most seasoned of sud lovers. In talking to the Brewers Association we realized:
Faced with a sea of hundreds of breweries and beers, fans want a more personalized experience, a solution that helps them navigate and participate in the festivities.
Knowing that, we partnered with GABF to design a mobile experience that would help fans plan, navigate and—most importantly—enjoy the festival. The result is “My GABF.” Using a variety of filters from style of beer to brewery names, a user could use the app to sort through thousands of beers and hundreds of breweries to 'bookmark their favorites' on their mobile devices prior to the festival. Once at the festival, they used this personalized map to find those favorites in the massive festival hall. To extend fan engagement beyond the festival, fans could also make tasting notes after they tried a beer and save those notes to later purchase the selected brew.
A simple, easy to use CMS (Content Management System) also allowed the Brewers Association team to update and manage the content in real-time.
Honored by the Webby Awards as one of the “Best Mobile and Apps - Event - Handheld Device”, My GABF exceeded expectations in every way. Feedback from both member brewers and GABF fans was extremely positive. Downloads and installs increased 35% year over year, with more than 17,500 active users registering 154,000 sessions, an average of 8.8 sessions per user. My GABF has now been a featured part of the festival four years running.That’s a solution we can all drink to!
Product Strategy, User Experience Design, User Interface Design, Mobile App Development
