Dive Brief:

• Busch announced the launch of a "Pop Up Schop," a temporary location hidden in a national forest open for one day, according to a press release shared with Marketing Dive.
• The AB InBev brand will dish out clues to the location of the Pop Up Schop via Twitter beginning on July 16, with the final location revealed on July 19. The Schop will be open on July 20 and hosted by Busch Guy, the brand's spokesperson.
• Those who find and visit the pop-up will have a chance to win a lifetime supply of beer via a raffle, and there will also be merchandise giveaways. Other prizes awarded to visitors will include passes to U.S. national parks and a cabin getaway for four. In addition, Busch has pledged to plan 100 trees across national forests for each visitor who visits the Schop.

Dive Insight:

With pop-up shops popping up all over, Busch appears to be changing up the trend with a creative scavenger hunt campaign on social media. Not only is the shop open for just a few hours, but it's hidden deep in the woods — and fans can only find it by following clues. Plus, by calling out the "long lines, extravagant merchandise and trendy locations" of other brands' pop-ups, Busch looks to poke fun at other marketers hopping on the pop-up bandwagon.

The hidden, rustic setting of Busch's activation and tie-in with the National Forest Foundation reinforces its positioning as the beer of the great outdoors. The brand said its commitment to plant a hundred trees in a U.S. national forest is part of parent Anheuser-Busch's continuing commitment to creating "a better world."

Busch launched an earlier campaign with the National Forest Foundation that involved a similar scavenger hunt on social media as a kind of precursor to the Pop Up Schop. In that effort, Busch marked six trees in U.S. national forests with medallions and shared clues about their whereabouts across the brand's social channels. The first person to find and post a photo of at least one of the six trees won a year of free Busch beer.

In both the Pop Up Schop and previous scavenger hunt campaigns, Busch appears to be working to ramp up its following on Twitter by dropping "breadcrumbs" on the platform. This is only the latest innovative social marketing campaign from the brand. Busch in March celebrated the start of baseball regular season with a social media contest to sponsor 10 recreational-league softball teams in its "Busch League" initiative.

The deep-in-nature setting is similar to The North Face's pop-up showroom in the Italian Alps last summer. That showroom, intended to launch the brand's Pinnacle Project for "rebellious spirits," was located at an altitude of 2,100 feet and could only be reached by foot. The North Face's mountaintop activation also had a purpose-driven element, with proceeds benefiting Società degli Alpinisti Tridentini (SAT), an Italian mountain climbing association.