Unrated came to the US with zero followers and a label that told drinkers to ignore the critics, so we built its social for the people who already did.

01 · Spring 2021

A rating-free wine, new to the US

Unrated was a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that called itself XTRA CAB. Its whole pitch was in the name: drink it without asking a critic first.

When we started work in May 2021, the Facebook page had no likes and the Instagram account had no followers. On our first call the team described their drinker as a millennial who didn’t connect with the classic wine crowd. The typical wine snob wasn’t the target.

So the first job was recognition. People had to know the bottle when they saw it on a shelf.

02 · The wrong crowd

Who we were talking to

We studied the label wines Unrated would sit beside. 19 Crimes and Freakshow had tens of thousands of followers. 19 Crimes’ feed pulled in several directions, and Freakshow’s carried four brands at once. Juggernaut was small, with under 2,000 Instagram followers, but its feed was the closest to what we wanted: consistent and clean. Unrated would show one wine, one label and one palette.

Wine snobs could scroll past.

The ad plan narrowed wine drinkers, 21 and over, down to the ones who also liked tattoos, leather, motorcycles, heavy metal, punk and grunge. We wrote three content pillars: XTRA CAB for the product, Taste Unrated for pairings, and Live Unrated for the life around the bottle. The community rule was a reply to every comment within a working day, written for that comment, because a pasted “love this” was the opposite of this brand.

• XTRA CAB
• Taste Unrated
• Live Unrated

03 · March 2022

Guitar, poker chips, leather

By early 2022 the feed needed photos of its own. We planned the shoot, cast it and hired the photographer. The brief asked for every frame to say “Unrated” before anyone read the label: dark neutrals with orange, red and burgundy, leather, metal and ripped denim, bold poses.

The brief’s prop list ran from records and a skateboard to smoke and messy food. On the day it came down to a guitar, drumsticks, poker chips and a lot of leather. The March 2022 shoot gave us 332 photos, and they went into the feed and into the ads.

guitar

poker chips

leather

04 · Every week

Posts, ads and the comments section

From mid-August 2021 we published on Facebook and Instagram, scoped at twelve posts a month on each plus six stories a month. We ran the ads: awareness campaigns so people would remember the bottle, and page-like campaigns to build an audience from nothing. In the first three months of 2022 those ads served 1.42M impressions and drew 14,250 clicks.

We also went out to people. The plan was daily outbound: comments on tattoo shops’ posts, metal fans’ posts and wine drinkers nobody would picture holding a Cabernet, each one written for the post.

And we built the creator program from scratch. We vetted about 75 creators who already lived the brand (skaters, musicians, tattoo artists), wrote the outreach, negotiated the deals and brought four on board.

#TASTEUNRATED

#LIVEUNRATED

05 · June 2022

What Unrated had when we finished

The account ran until June 2022. Unrated finished it with a feed that looked like no other wine on the shelf, a library of 332 photos from its own shoot, ad audiences built around the people it wanted, and a vetted list of creators who already fit.

One team did the strategy, the shoot, the ads, the comments and the creator deals, so all of it looked like the same wine.