Aaaaand…Relax Summer is Here
Aaaaand...relax summer is here
Aaaaand…relax. With Summer here, premium vodka brand Grey Goose is rolling out an extremely chill new campaign with MullenLowe. “Pour Yourself Something Smooth” is the tagline, and the lead spot is a special-effects driven thirty seconds of mellow. A man lies back on his garden recliner and finds it taking him down a gentle slide, as a Grey Goose on the rocks is spirited to his hand.
Nothing really happens in the ad, and that’s the point – it’s a mildly surreal evocation of the lazy summer feeling of lying back on a hot day with a cool drink. It’s building on the recent launch of the brand’s Grey Goose Essences line, which mixes herbal and botanical notes in with the vodka. And it’s playfully evoking the typical Grey Goose associations of living the good life.
The results are very strong, particularly for a spirit brand. It’s not unusual for spirits ads to aim for evocative rather than try to tell a story, but most of them don’t succeed as well as this, with a 4.1-Star result compared to the sector’s 2.1-Star US average. Even better is the exceptional short-term Spike score and very high Brand Fluency – areas where drinks brands often fall short. Grey Goose avoids that by being clearly branded and nailing the feeling it’s going for – if vodka is your tipple, it’s hard to imagine not being tempted here.
You might think, incidentally, that the reason for the ad’s high Fluency is the strong branding at the beginning. But in Test Your Ad Pro we ask what makes the ad recognisable – and almost half the audience mentioned a familiar character. That almost certainly means the friendly goose, who shows up at the end to honk his approval of the man’s choice of drink. It’s a nice touch that creates a lift at the end of the commercial – and a reminder of whose ad we’re watching, of course.
Creative agency credit: MullenLowe