‘New Tastes Good.’ – The Strongbow cider brand from the company Heineken UK just kicked off a UK-wide campaign, investing £12m to celebrate the market launch of the 95-calorie Strongbow Ultra Dark Fruit cider. The campaign was realized by Otherway, who have held the account since 2019 after beating Adam & Eve/DDB in a competitive pitch.
STANLEY’S POST : “We worked very closely with the lovely designers and team at OTHERWAY in collaboration with The Mill to produce this amazing campaign. We had a combination of assets. Some photography, some stock, and CGI of the goat and can from The Mill, London.
First we built a master background landscape, a mountainous island in the distance with a shallow sea moving towards the camera. A lot of work was put into the color – getting a good CMYK match with the Strongbow can. We used a combination of stock and photography to build a superwide version to cover all the crops of the deliverables. Once the CGI was approved and signed off on at The Mill, we started building the final master images. A close-up of the GOAT’S head – we had to draw a few new eyes – then its hoof, and the whole GOAT plus the can.
The Mill supplied us with several renders to help us out, extra passes for water swirling around the GOAT’s hooves, a little extra fur for when the can is on its head, and we used it all to build our final set of assets.
The early deliverables were needed for various tube station takeovers, including Oxford Circus tube station, London. We created a shallow water image, viewed from above, for the floor of the tube station tunnels, and a sky and clouds image for the tunnel ceilings. This made the experience truly immersive, walking into the purple GOAT world paddling through water with a purple sky and clouds above.
Simultaneously, the campaign rolled out in a huge OOH campaign across the UK, and a Manchester Piccadilly station takeover.”
We quote campaignlive.co.uk : “Commenting on the motivation behind Strongbow’s disruptive strategy, Rachel Holms, Heineken UK cider Brand Director, said that the cider market has ‘plateaued’ and took a hit after the pandemic. Holms explained that it’s ‘our responsibility, both Heineken UK and the category, to come up with some big pieces of innovation. Mainstream or vanilla advertising wasn’t going to get the cut through we really wanted, this had to be disruptive. We need to drive a reappraisal of the brand in terms of it fitting in with modern-day lifestyles. There’s nothing to fix with Strongbow, but there is everything to gain when it comes to making it relevant to our target audience.”
Jono Holt, founder of Otherway, added: “The whole ethos of Strongbow Ultra Dark Fruit is to inspire people to try something new and different. As such, we thought that if we are asking people to do something different, then we should create something different as well. The G.O.A.T is a well-known symbol of greatness across modern pop culture, and we thought it would be entertaining to claim our greatness in the drink world as well, hence, the purple goat was born.”
Strongbow is a cider brand from England which is meanwhile sold worldwide. Strongbow is produced by Bulmers in Hereford, which in turn is a proud Heineken subsidiary.
GoSee : strongbow.com & stanleyspost.com