Low budget - HIGH VALUE Ideas

Hello, creative souls!

This below ad unpacks several things and leaves you with 100 questions and a 1000 answers. But we’re picking the ones that really matter: 1. Can you cement your brand by talking purely about the feeling that you’re selling? 2. Can you make your brand stick without any imagery or barely even a mention of your product? 3. Can you make this ad in such a way that you don’t need fancy locations or visual effects?

The answer to all of this is, Yes.

That’s what Sprite did. They boldly claimed: "It's Haters season. Stay fresh."

In their campaign, “It’s haters season, stay fresh”, Sprite enlisted the help of Pole Dancing Champion Alberto Del Campo with a fairly simple concept - a single wide shot of him doing what he does best, but to the tune of voiceovers of… you guessed it, hate comments— might I add, he does this while looking F-R-E-S-H.

The GIST: The ad depicts Alberto spinning around, thinking he is graceful, while the narrator mocks him, calling him a "pervert" and "unnatural." The narrator questions the character's self-respect and job choice, criticizing him for making a "vulgar spectacle" of himself. In the end, the narrator concludes with a derogatory comment about the character's masculinity.

F-R-E-S-H here also means looking good irrelevant of all the hate/trolling one gets online. Untethered and Un-bothered about people’s opinions. What is more trigger friendly that a beefed up man dancing on a pole? It’s the best bait for keyboard warriors to start spewing their hate online. They touched upon the rather ugly reality of people in the public eye receiving hate comments and gave it their own twist - “Yeah, they exist, but HEY, stay fresh”.

If you boil it down to the bottom of it, this is something anyone can execute, and that’s what makes it brilliant. Sprite’s tagline of staying fresh is something everyone knows. A lot of people have definitely seen the ads that bring about this imagery. With this campaign, they ditched their on the face approach for something more subtle and metaphorical.

This is a brilliant way to tie your brand to real-world issues - it’s not pretentious and over the top, but it’s not small enough that it won’t leave a mark.

Sometimes you just have to say #ILOVEYOUHATERS

Ideas corner:

The internet today can be a harsh place. On any random day, you will find 10 different comments calling influencers and creators ‘cringe’.

But here’s the catch - they’re still watching, and being confidently ‘cringe’ can take you to your audience.

Here’s how you can execute the same for your brand:

• If your brand sells a lifestyle or an idea - go on the contrary with common misconceptions or opinions and juxtapose it with your vision

• For sports brands, you can talk about how sports is always considered second to academic performance while displaying victorious sportspeople

• For beauty products, you can take on unrealistic beauty standards and juxtapose with people being unabashedly themselves.

Figment is written by Abbhinav Kastura, a writer/producer who has spent a decade making impactful internet videos and Guru Nicketan, an advertising nerd, B2B Marketer, stand-up comedian, and a film buff.