Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Alcohol, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Brands, Communication Strategy, Crap Campaigns In History, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Delusion, Devious Strategy, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Mediocrity
Day 2 of 2025 and I’m still bursting with positive pessimism.
Helped because of stuff like this the following …
We all know one of the key roles of advertising is to add commercial momentum and value to business. Well, I recently saw a rather unique approach to achieving this goal with some work from vodka brand, Smirnoff.
Have a look at this.
What the absolute fuck?
What the hell is that copy?
What does it mean? What were they thinking? How the hell did this get approved?
I appreciate being associated with Russia these days is commercial suicide, but seriously, having Putin as their brand ambassador would be less shameful than this horror show.
And the overt attempt to boost business by attempting to be seen as a ‘social lubricant’ is about as subtle as a cucumber down a pair of cycling shorts.
“Don’t drink alone, drink with lots of people” … they scream.
To which I reply, why?
Why the hell should I?
And why the hell should it be with Smirnoff.
If you want to do that, how about you do something that creates the conditions that make me want to do it. Make it easy for me to do it.
But then, if you did that, it would mess up your ‘please drink responsibly’ message that you use to lobby governments to give you tax breaks because you’re more worried about the impact of declining alcohol sales and consumption than you are about excessive drinking.
Maybe. Ahem.
I’ve always felt Smirnoff – bar a couple of campaigns a 1000 years ago – have had a problem capturing and expressing who they are., but this is new depths of barrel scraping awful.
That said, I appreciate there’s also the possibility it could be an act of creative genius.
I appreciate those are wildly contrasting views, but it’s because I can’t tell if this ad is:
1. The result of the copywriter chugging down copious amounts of Smirnoff as they ‘wrote’ the headline. OR …
2. It has been purposefully designed to be so insane, it will make all who see it want to turn to drink and so Smirnoff sales rise.
Frankly, I can’t help but feel they’d have more luck with this ad if they targeted Pornhub’s audience, because ‘YOU DO YOU … NEEDS MORE US … WE DO US’ sounds more like an invitation to a swingers party than anything that would make anyone else give a damn.