History
The site was launched on Thursday 4 November 2004 (between 9:00 p.m. and Midnight Eastern Standard Time). Ten emails were sent out to friends of beer.com from their office to beta test “Virtual Bartender”. No other form of marketing was used and there were not any links from the home page or any other sites. No search engine marketing, banner ads or offline media were used to promote the campaign.
- November 5, 2004: More than 15,000 sessions. The first “Fan Forum” appeared from the UK where young DJs talked about the commands they discovered.
- November 6: Sessions began doubling - 30,000. More “Fan Forums” appeared around the world (Holland, Italy, Japan, USA)
- November 10: Over 500,000 sessions. Still going viral - The only way to get the Virtual bartender was through forwarded emails and the increasing number of 'Fan Forums' appearing in search engines. At that point, the average length of visit was 7 minutes and page views reached 7,980,000.
- By day 28 the site had reached 10 million sessions. It continued to receive hundreds of thousands of visitors each week.
Virtual Bartender won 'Best Interactive Viral' at the 2004 Viral Awards. The creative director of the campaign was Rick Brown.
By 2008, the site was no longer active.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Bartender
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