Truly Deeply/Madly

An Absolut(ly) Iconic Ad Cam­paign
Since my days at design school the Abso­lut Vodka ad cam­paign has been hailed as one of the most unique and iden­ti­fi­able brand cam­paigns in his­tory. The cam­paign began back in 1991 when Abso­lut began an art com­mis­sion­ing pro­gram to select artists from all 50 states in the U.S. Abso­lut Vodka arranged to run full-page ads in USA Today with images of the com­mis­sioned works every two weeks. Artists selected included Romero Britto, Jon Cof­felt, Bur­ton Mor­ris and Rev. Howard Fin­ster. A lim­ited edi­tion of 300 lith­o­graphs of each work were sold to raise funds for Design Indus­tries Foun­da­tion Fight­ing AIDS and a book called; ‘Abso­lut State­hood: 51 Painters, Visions of Their Home States’ was pub­lished. The flex­i­bil­ity and cre­ativ­ity of the cam­paign gave it longevity and made the brand instantly rec­og­niz­able in any medium.

How Do You Improve on Per­fec­tion?
The only prob­lem with an ad cam­paign as iconic as Abso­lut’s is that at some point — no mat­ter how great the cam­paign, the brand and its con­sumers will demand a new one. Adver­tis­ing is a world inspired by fresh­ness, and even the great­est cam­paigns even­tu­ally go stale in the hearts and minds of the mar­ket. For the peo­ple at Abso­lut, after nearly 20 years their cam­paign had begun to lose its mag­netic attrac­tion. And so they were faced with a quandary — how do you improve on perfection?

When Abso­lut came to this sticky cross-road they took the looked for and found a con­cep­tual thread to con­nect their old iconic cam­paign with the new: com­mis­sion­ing artists to express their per­sonal vision of the brand. They did this through the com­mis­sion of film mak­ers to make TVCs and built inte­grated cam­paigns around them. Here’s one of my favorites, ‘Abso­lut World’ fea­tur­ing a group of artists who come together in loca­tions around the world to cre­ate art pieces that spell out the phi­los­o­phy of Abso­lut Vodka:

The ‘In An Absolute World’ cam­paign has extended to many such cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tions. Another of my favorites is this inter­ac­tive music machine dubbed “ABSOLUT Quar­tet” com­mis­sioned by Abso­lut Vodka and envi­sioned by artists/technological sculptors/musicians Jeff Lieber­man and Dan Paluska. This project com­bines the spark of cre­ative thought with tech­no­log­i­cal knowl­edge to cre­ate a unique user experience:

Try going to the site and sub­mit­ting your own song and lis­ten to the ABSOLUT Quar­tet impro­vise your tune.

In An Absolute World has trans­lated into some less inspir­ing, although still cre­ative cam­paign exe­cu­tions that for most other brands would be con­sid­ered remarkable:

I applaud the aban­don with which Abso­lut have thrown them­selves into this new cam­paign, and it has plenty of scope to be taken even-further along the road of cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion, embrac­ing artists and pro­vid­ing (and reward­ing) them with even greater freedom.Will the end result measure-up to the heights of their iconic cam­paign of the 90s? I doubt it, but suc­cess can still be found in stay­ing true to their brand and con­tin­u­ing to striv­ing for genius.

If you’d like to have an inspir­ing dis­cus­sion about rais­ing your brand to the heights of remark­a­bil­ity, why not give us a call — we’re up for the challenge.

David Ansett, Bran­da­men­tal­ist
For daily updates of our brand think­ing, fol­low me on Twit­ter
Brand Designer

Tags: Absolut, Absolut vodka, Brand Agency, Brand Design, brand designers, Brand Experience, Brand Strategy, brand-designers-Melbourne, brandamentalist, Corporate Image, David Ansett, Graphic Design Melbourne, In an Absolut World, Melbourne Brand Strategy, Visual Language

This entry was posted on Monday, April 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Brand Agency, Brand Design, Brand-Storytelling, Graphic Design Melbourne. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.