In advertising beer brands are the most desirable accounts to obtain. So we can imagine Alfred has been popping some… um… Grolsch ‘beugeltjes’ when they found out they won one of the more sophisticated beer brands in the Netherlands. Grolsch, the past 7 years handled by DDB, is a beer for someone who prefers quality and good taste, rather than getting brainlessly drunk with friends. At least, that’s what it was always about. The best pay-off to illustrate that was: “One day you’ll stop drinking beer and start drinking Grolsch” (JWT). Sadly in the past years we haven’t seen any advertising with much aspiration anymore. The last one we can remember was ‘Everlasting love‘ – with the pay-off “Beer, the Grolsch way” (DDB). A few years ago Grolsch started to claim creativity in combination with music stars. Though a good idea in itself, the advertising was probably too complicated and therefore not picked up by the consumer. We can imagine that this made Grolsch go more mainstream, moving towards the other beer brands and away from its once unique positioning. The climax was the last commercial – shown above – celebrating the ‘pop’ sound, It felt so average that the pay-off “Beer that grabs you” sounded completely incredible. So, time for a change. We hope Grolsch allows Alfred to give the iconic brand back its exclusiveness. We wish them luck!
Royal Club (Vrumona-Heineken) and Schweppes (Dr. Pepper Snapple) have quite a lot in common. Both soft drinks are not your standard soft drink, because of their distinctive tastes. And both are often used for mixing drinks and thus easily associated with stylish get togethers. So it’s no coincidence that both brands at the moment use a character in a white suit to communicate the brands’ distinguished personalities. Royal Club already uses this character for a while. He was introduced in 2010 in a pretty smooth commercial created by Alfred. Now he’s back in this online activation that tells you how socially evolved you are; from amoeba to super hero. It uses your Facebook data together with the answers on some questions about how you would act in awkward situations during a date (“you accidentally kill your date’s parrot with a cork by popping the champagne while she’s away to slip into something more comfortable” What would you do?). We couldn’t tell how socially evolved we are, cause we didn’t have the patience to sit it all out – it’s quite a lengthy affair. Nevertheless the website is smartly designed by Rhinocreations. Then there is the Schweppes activation on the Schweppes Facebook fan page, created by Red Urban. We have to say that compared to the Royal Club man, the Schweppes man doesn’t look very attractive. He measures your ‘Schweppes appeal’ by letting you repeat some pick-up lines (with a French accent) in your microphone at the same speed and intonation – a very difficult task. It is hard for us to judge these Facebook-data/webcam/microphone interactions, cause we see them all the time – it has become more of the same. What’s good about them is that they engage the consumer for more than 30 seconds, but we’d be really curious to learn what they do for these brands – other than increasing the brand awareness.
Alfred and Lowe Amsterdam founded a new agency, Lowe@Alfred, that will solely service Unilever’s brands. For Alfred this is a separate agency that will operate next to its existing agency. For Lowe it’s the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. The merger was initiated by Unilever who is a client of both agencies and asked for one strong local agency with an international network. Alfred is the strong local agency and Lowe has the network. What’s interesting about this merger is that Alfred is founded by ex Lowe employees Marcel van Wing, Aad Kuijper, and Patrick de Zeeuw. When they left Lowe, they took Lowe’s (or Aad Kuijper’s, if you will) one trick pony with them; humorous advertising (mainly for FMCG’s) that makes parents feel good. Chairman Tony Wright from Lowe + Partners calls this “populistic creative ideas”, which sounds like a contradiction to us, but has proven to be a concept that sells Unilever’s products wonderfully well. For example, Alfred recently won the ‘Gouden Loeki’ (the only award that represents what consumers think is good advertising) for Unilever’s Calvé peanut butter. The commercial is practically a remake of an old Lowe concept from the 80s, but since the consumer loves it, the lack of originality it is not an issue for Unilever. For Lowe this merger seems to be the light at the end of the tunnel; in less than a decade it changed from one of the most successful agency’s in the industry to a handful of people subrenting some space at Interpublic’s sister McCann. And for Alfred it’s a big compliment; in exactly four years time it has grown so strong that today it is able to swallow Lowe Amsterdam – at least, that is what the name Lowe@Alfred suggests.
