How to nail brand ritual

A recent speculative project, not associated with Stella Artois but aimed at its audience, picks up on a common trope, ‘beer label peeling’.

For decades, Stella Artois has built campaigns around rituals that elevate the beverage. The brand’s European cinema aesthetic and ‘Reassuringly Expensive’ era saw several carefully curated sipping experiences.

Gabriel Apavaloaie's independent film is far more modern, but still built on a behavioural insight, in this case: "When a conversation gets good, people start peeling the label off the bottle."

There is no grand narrative to this project, and the film instead focuses on a single social moment in which a group of friends share drinks, and the peeling occurs as the conversation deepens, before disappearing entirely.

Indeed, Apavaloaie says the film was created in one day, with zero budget, relying on “Good friends and real passion for advertising."

How to nail brand insight

This effort is one of many speculative projects that pass our eyes daily, which raises several questions for creatives. Are such efforts a smart way to promote your creative pedigree? Have you ever hired someone based on speculative work? What do you make of this speculative work or others? (email tom@creativemoment.co for any insight by all means)

What’s clear is that this one belongs to a lineage of campaigns that identify small, often unconscious actions that reveal a cultural observation.

Much of Guinesses’ advertising oeuvre celebrates the virtues of patience while waiting out the beverage’s prolonged pouring ritual. McDonald's ’The Night Is Young’ by Leo Burnett, meanwhile, observed the familiar trope of people extending a night out with "just one more stop". The campaign turned McDonald's glowing signs into symbols of that moment when friends decide they're not ready to go home.

Heinz is perhaps paramount in the genre (if this is a genre?). ‘Pass the Heinz’ is based on the various unconscious habits of people reaching for ketchup even when there isn't any Heinz present. The ads showed food waiting for an absent bottle, highlighting an automatic consumer behaviour. KitKat’s ‘Have a break’ ads are also based around various rituals that reveal how indebted the consumer is to the snack.

The one gripe we have with Apavaloaie’s otherwise very memorable and well-observed recent effort is whether the act of peeling a bottle really is conducive to good conversation?

We tend to associate it with boredom or sexual frustration. Not speaking from experience, of course.