Nespresso Happy Hour.
Australia's first morning rave. Sun-up DJ sets, free iced coffee, and a 99% lift on Nespresso's iced coffee sales.
Nespresso had the only capsule iced coffee blend on the market, but Gen Z (the demographic drinking the most iced coffee in Australia) weren't buying it. They were going to ready-to-drink cans, or to cafés. The brief was to make Nespresso the obvious choice for an audience already in motion, in a category they didn't yet associate with Nespresso.
The drinking culture young Australians grew up with isn't the one they're choosing now. They're swapping late nights for early starts, drinking less alcohol, and putting morning coffee at the centre of the day. McCrindle research, commissioned for the campaign, sharpened the picture: 76% of Gen Z and 75.9% of Millennials planned to wake earlier in 2025 to reclaim 'me time' (versus 48% of Gen X and 31% of Boomers), with coffee top of the list for how they wanted to spend it.
The question writes itself. Why should PM get all the fun?
We launched Nespresso Presents: Happy Hour. Australia's first morning rave, inverting the booze-PM template into iced-coffee-AM. Same energy, same crowd, different time of day.
Two events, two cities. Sydney at North Bondi Fish on February 21, 7am. Melbourne at Soundmerch on February 28, 7am. Free iced lattes from Nespresso's iced range, free DJ sets from Cosmo's Midnight (Sydney) and Winston Surfshirt (Melbourne). Six creators on the ground at each event extended the moment into the feeds the audience already lived in.
The work was earned-creative end-to-end: a real cultural event the audience would want to be at, then content engineered to make people who weren't there wish they had been. McCrindle's research carried the news angle for press; the activation carried the brand experience; the talent carried the social proof.
Activation. 574 people through the door across the two morning raves. Queues around the block at both. Two real cultural events that gave the campaign a centre, not a rollout calendar.
Creator + earned. 80 creator and talent posts driving 7.6M reach. 37 pieces of top-tier media coverage across Mumbrella, B&T, Mediaweek, LBB, Mi3 and beyond. The activation was widely picked up not as advertising but as a genuine cultural moment.
Commercial. A 10,000-visit spike on Nespresso's site, and a 99% lift in iced coffee sales. The proof point that mattered most: Nespresso moved from a brand the iced-coffee audience didn't think of, to one they actively chose.