Vizzy Hard Seltzer Taps Drag Star Queen Priyanka For Ongoing Visibility Campaign

Hard seltzer brand Vizzy is rolling out a major inclusivity campaign, appointing notable drag star Priyanka as the brand’s community impact director.

With Priyanka leading the charge, the Molson Coors-backed hard seltzer brand is rolling out a creative grant program, offering funding, mentorships and media placements for LGBTQ+-produced art projects.

This announcement comes just days after Molson Coors unveiled a $100-million investment aimed at bolstering hard seltzer production in the Canadian market.

Under the #Vizzybility project, Vizzy will partner with notable nonprofit Queer Collective to appoint grants valued at $35,000 each to four Canadian LBTQ+ artists. Each grant includes one-on-one mentorships with Priyanka, features in brand social content, enrollment in a month-long virtual artist incubator with Queer Collective and spotlights in earned media outreach in the Canadian market.

Priyanka, the winner of Canada’s Drag Race and a well-regarded television personality, will be the face of the brand, but will also work with Vizzy to continue highlighting visibility and diversity across the brand’s initiatives. “In addition to coming up with the idea and being involved with every detail leading up to launch, I am also excited to be able to mentor the grant recipients to help them bring their creative vision to life and be able to bring more visibility to those in the LGBTQ+ community through my social channels and across this entire project.”

While other hard seltzer brands try to make noise in a cluttered market with new flavors or attention-grabbing campaigns, Priyanka points out that the campaign is driven to promote a largely unrepresented and misrepresented category of drinkers.

“As a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community and a person of color, I understand first-hand what it feels to be under-represented. I’m not alone, as 69% of the Canadian LGBTQ+ community feel underseen and misrepresented in the media.”

Leslie Malcolm, the brand’s marketing director, noted Vizzy is aiming to push diverse representation across all levels of the brand. “We assembled focus groups and worked with LGBTQ partners and vendors to identify a cause that would directly impact the community. We assembled an advisory panel of spokespeople and organizations and making sure they joined at the table.” she said. “We’re building the brand from the ground up and that allowed us to show who we want to stand for.”

In her new role, Vizzy will also push Priyanka’s own work. “With Vizzy’s support, I’m kicking off with my own art by creating music videos for the new songs which will be on my upcoming debut EP. I hope that they inspire other queer people to become the popstars of their own lives, whatever that means for them,” she notes.

Vizzy is relatively new to market, launching stateside in 2019 and in Canada early last year. As one of the first seltzer brands out of the Molson Coors stable, the team had the opportunity to build the brand from scratch.

“As a brand,” says Malcolm, “We focused on listening. In order to contribute, we needed to listen and understand where and how we could best make an effort.” 

In 2019, Molson Coors dropped ‘Brewing Co’ from its name to position itself to further compete in the growing hard seltzer market. 

“After 235 years under the label of a ‘Brewing Company,’ we redefined ourselves in 2020 as the Molson Coors Beverage Company

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, ready to commit and expand our offering beyond the beer aisle as a serious player catering to new consumer demands and evolving repertoires,” says the brand.

This weekend, the brewing giant announced an investment of $100 million in spirit and malt-based hard seltzer production in Canada.

The investment will triple the hard seltzer output of Molson Coors’ Toronto site, installing reverse osmosis and nanofiltration technology, a flavor kitchen, a blender and canning line.

“The number one priority for our Canadian business is ramping up our hard seltzers to position ourselves as a top-share performer,” said Brian Erhardt, chief supply chain officer for Molson Coors, said in a statement. Molson Coors anticipates the hard seltzer category will become a multi-billion dollar segment in the next few years in Canada.

Since Vizzy launched in Canada last year, it earned the title of one of the company’s ‘most successful launches.’ With campaigns like this angled at winning over an important drinker demographic, the brand seems to be moving full speed ahead.