Branding

The image lingers in your subconscious long after the page is gone from your sight. Those seductively curving shoulders. The elegant tapered neck. The full-lipped mouth. Okay, snap out of it! You’ve just fallen in love with the Absolut Vodka bottle, one of the most recognized silhouettes in advertising history.

From a flock of pigeons congregating in Piazza San Marco in the shape of a bottle for “Absolut Venice,” to the wry send-up of film classic “Citizen Kane” featuring a bottle-shaped wooden sled connoting “Absolut Rosebud,” the venerable Swedish distiller of 80 proof white lightning has spent the past two decades avoiding traditional advertising campaigns that focus on extrinsic product attributes.

Instead, Absolut has internalized the hip, erudite and esoteric qualities of its users developing a brand image in which “the bottle is hero,” explains Carlos Davila, creative director of Puerto Rico-based JMD Communications, Absolut’s Spanish-language media agency. “Absolut’s target isn’t income or age, but more a state of mind,” he adds. The result is a legacy of glossy, back-of-the-book visuals which are so eye-arresting, irreverent and provocative that collectors all over the world buy and sell Absolut’s print ads as if they were fine art.

So it isn’t surprising that five years ago when Absolut decided to make a test-run into the newly emerging medium of the Internet, it decided to avoid the banners, buttons and page sponsorships which remain the predominant forms of e-advertising by constructing edgy, artistic Web sites that meshed with its offline brand image. “Banners are creatively bankrupt,” states Dan Braun, former creative director at TBWA Chiat/Day, which spearheaded Absolut’s earliest forays online while continuing to work on Absolut’s print campaign.

According to Braun, who left TBWA to co-found New York branding studio Submarine along with Absolut account director Pete Callaro, an audience segmentation study revealed that Absolut had two influential categories of users, each of which were Internet-savvy: (1) “rad-grads,” recent college graduates who were hackers and crackers, technology-oriented people instrumental in designing and employing the Web; and (2) “digital papparazzi,” writers, artists and filmmakers who were telling people what the Internet was about and were a highly influential group.

But in 1995, no one was certain how to effectively monitize online commerce, so Braun and Callaro convinced Absolut that a key use for the Internet was as a platform to expand the branding experience by making Absolut a destination on the information highway. The goal was to extend Absolut’s print campaign, as well as the performance and art installations Submarine had been staging for Absolut by creating “an interesting online experience for our core users, which was as visionary as our live experiences,” Braun offers.

Wrapping the Brand Around Digital Entertainment

The result was an e-marketing approach that intentionally blurred the edges between content and entertainment by weaving visually stunning images with marketing messages using the Absolut silhouette. “The brand is wrapped around the entertainment experience,” Braun explains.

The first Web site was “Absolut Kelly,” an online museum curated by Kevin Kelly who was editor of Wired magazine at the time. Bringing together technology with biology through the use of cool visuals, the site reached hundreds of thousands in “an impactful way,” according to Callaro and Braun. “Our goal was never to drive millions of users,” Callaro emphasizes, “but to drive people to the site who spend time there.”

Absolut was delighted with its first iteration online, seeing it as an extension of its carefully crafted image of sophistication mixed with a bit of self-deprecating humor. As a result, Braun and Callaro were given the green light to establish two more sites, Absolut Panushka, in which digital filmmaker Christine Panushka created online animation shorts incorporating the Absolut image, and Absolut DJ, which mixed sound and digital images to attract a broader audience of younger users accustomed to downloading music from the Web. The DJ branding experience was reinforced with a tie-in to live concerts that are still touring the country.

Although Absolut wasn’t married to a quantitative result from the Web sites, when the metrics were reviewed it was found that the average visit to Absolut DJ lasted seven minutes. “That’s seven minutes alone with subtle, Absolut-branded messages,” Braun boasts. Moreover, the buzz generated by this cutting-edge approach garnered kudos from publications such as Rolling Stone and Billboard, placements Absolut would not otherwise have bought, Callaro adds. In a medium seeking to establish some tradition, “Absolut’s approach is untraditional,” Braun exclaims.

Absolut’s Untraditional Olé


So when Absolut decided to launch its first online media campaign this year it characteristically veered away from the expected use of English-language mega-portals like America Online, MSN and Yahoo!, and instead chose StarMedia Network—a New York City-based aggregator of Spanish and Portuguese speaking e-audiences in the U.S. and Latin America—as its first Internet partner. According to Peter Blacker, senior vice present of global strategy for StarMedia, Absolut was looking to enter Internet markets that were growing and Latin America was a prime candidate. A recent Jupiter report predicts that Latin America will experience a whopping 68 percent online growth rate by 2005.

With a unique user base of over 12 million representing more than half the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Internet users in Latin America, Absolut saw a chance to expose its brand to StarMedia’s core group of young, upwardly mobile professionals who are Internet-attuned. “These people are opinion leaders,” Davila offers. “They are the people who move the wave,” which is precisely the image Absolut projects.

The challenge, however, was that Absolut was also looking to be where no one has been before—to have ads that users experienced like nothing else. “Absolut’s ads have to be the point of reference and touch new ground,” Davila explains. Absolut recognized that while its www.absolutvodka.com site is effective as a Web destination, it wasn’t really advertising.

As JMD wondered how to take Absolut online, StarMedia showed up in San Juan and made a presentation about how it was developing new technology to re-invent marketing, hoping to garner some of JMD’s clients as its advertisers. “A lot of what we’ve done is ahead of the curve, pushing the envelope because we have had to fight for recognition in growing markets more than the English language giants,” Blacker explains.

It was kismet. Davila saw an opportunity to put SMN’s cutting-edge technology together with an entirely new and unique online campaign for Absolut to further its brand image as sophisticated yet unconventional and unpredictable. The JMD team came up with the concept of using light, little ads that move over the screen “in a good way,” tell a complete story, bring a smile and then disappear. They left it to SMN to devise the implementing technology.

At first StarMedia came back with pop-up windows that had animation inside, something JMD rejected as too intrusive and too ordinary for Absolut. Eventually SMN found a new way of using DHTML code to create intricate and eye-snagging layers of animation that moved both vertically and horizontally across the screen, appearing randomly but which didn’t impede the user’s experience, and most importantly would be perceived by the viewer as “a gift or surprise which was entertaining,” says StarMedia producer Mary Ellen Duckman. Although it was Absolut’s first online campaign, Duckman emphasizes they wanted it to be adventurous, like their ad campaigns on the back of magazines. “They wanted people to get excited.”

Well, Absolut was excited. In June, the Swedish vodkamaker’s vice president of marketing Eva Kempe-Forsberg announced to the world that the synergy of JMD’s creativity and StarMedia’s innovative technology had “once again placed Absolut on the cutting edge of the advertising world.”

Since June, three of these ads have been running on SMN’s music, entertainment, travel and postcard channels, destinations specifically selected by Absolut to fit with the company’s psychographic profile. Someone clicking onto one of the selected channels may spontaneously encounter a bright yellow lemon tumbling across his screen which cracks open like an egg to reveal a bottle of Absolut Citron and then disappears; or a spider busily weaving a Web whose center is the famous bottle shape; or a spinning wind-up toy key chugging along the edges of the screen until it wheels into view and reveals that the key is attached to an Absolut vodka bottle. Or they may not.

The appearances of these branding vignettes are programmed to materialize on the screen seemingly by chance. “We didn’t want something you could surely get to,” Davila explains. However, users are so addicted to these crisp bits of animation that they are hitting their refresh buttons over and over. In fact, JMD and SMN find that these quickie clips are driving traffic back to the selected channels because users are hoping to snag a glimpse. “It’s like a treasure hunt,” adds StarMedia’s Shirley Salmeron.

“But there are metrics too,” notes Marisabel Tapias, SMN’s Absolut account director. Although the different countries are showing varying preferences, overall the ads are getting extremely high response and click-through rates, with the lemon showing a yield ratio of click throughs divided by impressions of 2.22, and the spider netting a 4.0 yield, especially with U.S. Hispanics.

However, Tapias doesn’t want to get too lost in the measurements because this is really a branding campaign. Blacker echoes these sentiments praising Absolut as, “a client who understands that the Internet is effective in continuing to grow the success of their brand values.”

As for the future, although the present StarMedia campaign ended in October, JMD still has seven story ideas in development and expects to continue pushing the Absolut brand to the creative edge of the Internet universe. At the same time the folks at Submarine are launching an experimental Web site in January 2001, which has a concept they can only describe as tantalizing. But whatever shows up on screens across the planet, the sure bet is that somewhere it will have an innovative incarnation of the famous silhouette, and of course, it will be absolutely Absolut.

© Copyright 2001 by Dotfactor.com

Top of Page