Hasta La Creative!

Kenny Chesney is playing on the jukebox and the beer is flowing. "Are you guys from around here?" the bartender asks. "Close by," says Kent Rademaker, sidling up to the small-town bar with Tyler Witkin and Jenny Hall. The three are casually chatting like friends out for a cold brew on this hot afternoon in late May. 

But they don’t live anywhere close by, and they are not here to socialize. They are undercover, on assignment for a big-city ad agency that is many miles away. Mr. Rademaker, Ms. Witkin and Ms. Hall work for Chicago-based Cavalry, which has made this town its own little test market, a place agency staffers visit time and again to secretly observe how consumers shop, dine and drink.

Karl Turnbull, Cavalry’s chief strategy officer, led the charge in picking the town, which was chosen from among a dozen cities. The WPP agency, which was formed a year ago to handle Coors brands and new products for MillerCoors, calls it the "Outpost." An internal document describes it as a "secret weapon" that is a "slice of middle America we’ve adopted as our own to test drive new ideas and unlock authentic consumer insights." The project is so secret that only a handful of MillerCoors execs know about it, and none of them know the town’s identity, Cavalry CEO Marty Stock said.

Continue reading at AdAge.com