Battle of the Cones

The goal of this campaign was to find a way to drive engagement on our regional social channels as well as on our umbrella brand, Adirondacks, USA. Sponsored posts and daily content only go so far. We wanted to see if there was a way to achieve these goals organically.

We figured that the best way to drive organic engagement is to tap into something that both the visitors and locals feel strongly about, but that isn’t controversial or serious. After all, we don’t want to lose followers in the process.

We landed on a regional phenomenon of summer ice cream stands. If you’re not from the North Eastern US, you might not be as familiar with this, but up here, where summers are short, there are dozens of ice cream stands that are only open for 4-5 months at most. But in that limited time, they do a brisk business and have an almost cult-like following. Ask anyone and they can tell you what their favorite stand is and they will defend that choice.

So we developed an idea called the Battle of the Cones, which would have followers voting for their favorite ice cream stands as they face off in a tournament bracket to determine who will be crowned the victor. To keep things from getting too serious, I designed the visual elements of the campaign to be playful and light. Our content team suggested two ice cream cones boxing and they were spot on. I illustrated the main graphic using Procreate on my iPad and paired that with a fun typography and pastel color palette.

The campaign launched on August 1, 2022 and will run till the end of that month. With the success of this campaign we are already hoping to expand the concept next year and spread the voting out over the entire summer. This will likely involve printed collateral to send to the ice cream stands to get them in on the fun.