IRN-BRU Milks Attention With “Nessie Nectar”

Which of System1’s core metrics is more important: long-term Star Rating or short-term Spike Rating? It depends on the business goals your ad is supporting. Advertising is one of your strongest tools for long-term brand building, so we tend to focus on Star Rating as our core measure. But there are times when you’re aiming squarely for that short-term sales hit.

Take IRN-BRU’s Nessie Nectar, for instance. Like many food and drink brands, the legendary Scottish soft drink is experimenting with limited edition product runs and mystery flavours. These are promotional items designed to move off shelves quickly, but also built for buzz. The advertising around them needs to entertain and get people talking – if it builds the brand, so much the better.

So the “Nessie Nectar” advert, one of IRN-BRU’s last with long-term agency Leith, sets out to amuse but also to shock. Presented as a mock documentary, the ad shows a man whose job is a “Nessie milker”. He lives on the shores of Loch Ness and practises milking the legendary beast on a pair of huge rubber teats. The milk – sorry, the Nessie Nectar – is what you’re drinking. If it sounds gross, don’t worry, a lot of the audience agree – the ad gets a big dose of Disgust on the Test Your Ad Trace.

But it also earns a lot of surprise and happiness, too. IRN-BRU has a reputation to uphold for cheeky, subversive and shocking ads – think about its Christmas classic “Snowman” parody, for example. So while a lot of brands couldn’t risk making their audience feel a strong negative emotion, IRN-BRU has won permission to push the envelope further and get away with it. That’s exactly what they’re doing with “Nessie Nectar”.

The result is an ad which actually performs well on the long-term Star Rating metric, with a good 3.4-Star score putting it above the average for the soft drinks category in the UK. But look at Spike Rating, our predictor of short-term sales, and you see the ad’s real value. It’s an Exceptional performer on Spike in a very competitive category, coming in far above the sector’s high average.

While Star Rating is driven by positive emotion, what matters in the shorter-term is the intensity of any emotion audiences feel. And for “Nessie Nectar” that Exceptional score is driven by a far higher than average rating for Emotional Intensity. The cocktail of amusement, innuendo and shock IRN-BRU are serving up here all helps create the mix of emotions that leads to high intensity. It’s that willingness to create controversy and entertainment that’s helped a small brand punch way above its weight in the soft drinks sector, and created a highly distinctive identity for IRN-BRU.