Dissecting the longest uninterrupted advertising campaign ever
Its amazing how Absolut made its bottle the most recognizable in the world, despite having nothing distinct about it!
Look at their ad above, which features bottles swinging merrily in the wild and was so successful that it didn’t stop running for 25 years. It’s the longest running uninterrupted ad campaign ever and comprises over 1,500 separate ads over print and video – all of them showing the bottle with a halo above the two word tagline “Absolut Perfection”.
The efficacy of this campaign was can be judged by the fact that initially Absolut had a meagre 2.5% of the vodka market, but in the late 2000’s, Absolut began importing almost 5 million cases per year which amounted to half of the entire imported vodka in the U.S.
So what was the strategy behind a most successful ad campaign?
#Absolut team understood the core point that they were selling vodka and not the ad. The hero of their messaging is the bottle – The Absolut Star.
#Absolut positioned itself as “a smart, stylish, contemporary, creative, unexpected, witty brand of superior quality” with its positioning strongly reinforcing this brand identity.
Even after two decades, there’s plenty of life left in the Absolut advertising stable. So as a marketer, what is the lesson here?
The boring looks of your product may not be an impediment if you can weave an interesting story around it. After all, Absolut created 1500 ads of one bottle! An amazing brand journey that inspires all of us to focus on product differentiation