Fantastic news! Last Thursday night, McCann Erickson and Coca-Cola Ireland won the best Advertising Campaign of the year for 2008 at the Marketing Institute AIM awards.
That’s Aengus (our Sprite client) in the background picking up the award. That’s Jono (from our Media department) in the foreground giving the rarely seen ‘double thumbs-up’ sign.
This is our second win for CCI at the AIM awards in two years – some achievement.
Sprite ‘JD Quench’ beat competition from Premier Foods (Erin), Diageo (Guinness and Carlsberg) and Hibernian Aviva (Launch Campaign) to win the award for best Ad Campaign.
This has been such a fun project to work on from start to finish – beginning with the Thirst Never Wins Online / TV work last summer and now with this print campaign.
Creating an imaginary back catalogue for J.D. Quench just makes me laugh. I love the idea that this forgotten giant of D-Movies appears to have spent his entire career in a series of Sprite Film Productions with entirely similar plots.
‘Mouth of Fire’ takes J.D. to the Orient. In my mind the film was shot in Chinatown, L.A. in 1973; they never would have had the budget to travel. No doubt J.D. himself would have put in at least two days martial arts training in advance of filming (he was never a great believer in ‘method’ acting). The plot would have revolved around J.D. overcoming a nasty Chinese ‘T.H.I.R.S.T.’ gang with his specially adapted Sprite nunchuck - all accompanied by very, very loud; very, very badly synched sound effects.
‘The Elemonator’ would have been much maligned on release but then go on to be considered a hugely influential Sci-Fi classic when re-assessed years later. Here J.D. is sent back, from the future, to 1974 (conveniently!). His mission would have been to prevent an alternative global future where people would have been denied the thirst quenching qualities of Sprite forever: something just not worth thinking about.
I would guess there might have been some groundbreaking (read: really dodgy) special effects throughout.
Movie credits where they are due - these posters were illustrated by Bruce Emmett through the Folio Illustration Agency in London.
The idea behind the JD Quench campaign we recently created for Sprite, was born out of the global positioning of Sprite as “The Nemesis of Thirst”.
This seemed like a great starting point for a brand strong on thirst quenching and refreshment credentials. The challenge facing the McCann team, was how to make a brilliant brand story from it.
Armed with a simple but wide open idea, the creative team, closet fans of the world of 70’s Blaxploitation movies, imagined a world where a maverick cop (J D Quench) cleaned up the streets of 1970’s LA and took on the T.H.I.R.S.T gang with his trusty Sprite weapons.
The big leap they asked us all to take was that we had to imagine there was actually a movie shot in the 70’s based on this premise and that our entire campaign for Sprite would essentially be the film trailers for a movie that never existed.
Shot in LA by director Charley Stadler (who we actively encourage any of you to work with for his uniquely blend of German efficiency and chaos), the JD Quench campaign breaks every rule possible – Bad acting, bad camera work, awful direction, wooden casting, atrocious editing and a rubbish sound mix. It took some great work to make the finished product this bad.
But in the spirit of the idea it works and kudos to our clients Sharon Walsh and Aengus King who supported us all along the journey. The end product looks so dreadful that it’s something to be proud of.
Within a few months, the results are testament to a great effort by all involved.
Enjoyment scores for Sprite advertising jumped from 70% to 94%. “Makes the brand more appealing” indicators moved from 70% to 81%.*
61% of consumers felt that advertising made the brand more appealing (vs 51% norm).*
57% felt that it was a campaign you would talk about (vs 37% norm).*
The campaign has contributed to a 5.9% increase in Sprite growth by Q3 2008 compared to a 6% decline on the part of 7-Up.**
* Millward Brown ** AC Nielsen
And as if to prove effective work = creative glory, the JD Quench campaign was honoured with a Kinsale Shark award and three ICAD bells.
