JOSE CUERVO, OK GO / CUERVO COLD

'I like to do crazy shit in crazy places, it's on my CV,' so said Peter Gutierrez, Jose Cuervo International's managing director. And so the tequila brand, with the help of integrated agency, Albion, London, created a partnership with the band and viral sensation OK Go, running a series of pop-up gigs in São Paulo and Rio.

The experiential side of things was balanced with an online experience, which saw one of the live gigs being filmed and fed through Shotcast - transforming the footage of the band into pixels made up of Twitter and Facebook avatars. Viewers can tweet #shotcast or sign in through Facebook connect to share and read messages through the video.

Damian Kulash, the band's lead singer, told Contagious: 'I think it's an ingenious way to market from Cuervo's perspective. What we care about is making exciting things. We just want to make cool stuff and I think it's way cooler for Cuervo to help cool stuff get made, and associate themselves with that experience, rather than the hard sales pitch that I think most companies are usually trying to do.'

'Our product is about bonding, about release and about the experience of drinking tequila. You never drink tequila alone, for example. A tequila occasion is a community occasion. And that thought was at the heart of the brief that went over to Albion, which was how do we recreate that bonding/release moment through a marketing experience? You can only get that via an experience that forces you to reappraise everything you thought about Tequila and therefore Cuervo, which is what the ice cold shot's about.'

The band were seen as ideal partners thanks to their impressive viral and creative credentials (see their previous music videos here). Kulash explained: 'We've really been looking for ways to play with the parameters of rock shows.' OK Go are established in the States, but have a relatively smaller fanbase in Brazil, and Kulash credited the partnership with helping the brand, who are not signed to a label, create something that they couldn't have produced independently: 'This is definitely one of the most collaborative projects we've ever done with a brand. We never could have pulled it off by ourselves. Cuervo and their creative agency have done all the logistics and they've been kind enough to let us be involved in the look and the feel, but we basically show up and play.'

Jason Goodman, Albion's CEO, believes: 'You know Cuervo are a partner, basically. That's the difference between a sponsorship and a collaboration in my book. We've talked a lot about blurred business models. So it's branded content, it's advocacy, it's all the buzz words into one box.'

The brand sees the effort as a platform that it can build on and adapt to different markets around the world, but acknowledges that to maintain its early advantage it will have to continue to roll out further iterations before all of the results are known.

Shotcast's strength and originality lie in the bravery and mutial collaboration between the brand and the band. Goodman praised his client's attitude: 'We call people like Peter [Gutierrez] an entrepreneur. They manifest all the same characteristics but inside a large corporate organisation. And I do think that does require a certain amount of bravery, ambition, and the willingness to have complete faith or a sense of hope. He's not the marketing director at Cuervo, he's the managing director. It's very similar to when you're working with a founder, they're pretty much running the show, not just the marketing. I do think there aren't a lot of marketeers who are willing to take risks at the moment, everything has to be somehow guaranteed, but business isn't guaranteed, and there's no reason why marketing should be guaranteed either.'

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