current work
Late in 1999, Vinny came across a short film featuring a group of
friends shouting "Whassup!" at each other. He thought it would make
a great Budweiser commercial. He was right. It was an instant hit with
beer-drinkers who found they couldn't but utter the catchphrase over
and over again.
The Whassup! campaign went on to become the most awarded, most
popular beer advertising campaign in history, spawning hundreds of
user-created online parodies and spoofs in the media. The campaign
spread virally all over the world via the Internet generating hundreds
of millions of views.
It was calculated that in the first three months of the campaign alone,
Whassup! generated more than $30 million worth of free media coverage
(they kind of lost count after that). It later evolved into the first self-sustaining
advertising campaign. Consumers created the ads, and they ran for free
on the Internet.
August Busch IV, the chairman of Anheuser-Busch, said of the campaign
in USA TODAY: "In our lifetimes we will never see so much value created
by a single idea".
Click here to get an idea of much free media was generated.