Cheers! There’s life in the spirits category

  By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• When you’ve been in the biz far too long -like yours truly- every time you confront an advertising execution of some sort you can see right through it: the stale “strategy”, the focus groups, the power point decks, the creative tropes, the tired gimmicks, the usual clichés.
• Like any drug dealer would tell you, only fools consume their own product.
• Every now and then though a campaign crosses my path that truly and honestly makes me interested in the actual product it is peddling.
• As opposed to just trying to force feed me some artificial lifestyle or other.
• I’m talking about the latest Smirnoff vodka campaign featuring Ted Danson.
•  See, I’ve done my share of work in the spirits category.
• Granted, it is a damn tough category to crack.
• Everything’s been tried, everything you come up with looks and sounds like déjà vu.
• At some point in the early 00s liquor advertising became a litany of self-help slogans out of a Tony Robbins seminar.
• Usually with some Pavlovian play on words reminiscent of the brand name, such as “Keep Walking” (Johnny Walker, duh)*
• As Ted Sann, legendary creative director at BBDO in the golden years of the 80s & 90s, used to say: cut the middleman, shoot the brief.
• Another tired fetish of the category is to prey on the hormone-fueled insecurities of 20-something post adolescents.
• It’s cringe-inducing.
• Been there, done that.
• Guilty as charged.
• Anyhoo.
• Not all is lost.
• The Smirnoff campaign I mentioned above, IMHO, hits all the right notes.
• An honest brief devoid of nonsense.
• A solid value prop.
• A few clever testimonial-style scripts with a generous dose of self-deprecating humor.
• A relevant spokesperson with proven comedic timing and unafraid to make fun of himself.
• Bingo.

See for yourself here:

 

 

And CLICK HERE.

 

*Other examples: Live with chivalry (Chivas Regal); Be cointreauversial (Cointreau) and the worst planning-driven, focus group-vetted piece of crap I’ve seen in years: Be the mëister (Jägermeister)