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If you’re going to claim that your brand’s sustainability principles make you ‘the vodka with nothing to hide’, then you’re going to have to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, right?
Well the production team of Absolut vodka certainly do both in the company’s brilliant new video – Absolut, the vodka with nothing to hide.
In fact, there are a lot of hides in the ‘employee induction’ video, naked ones. The video (in reality, the brand’s new advertising campaign) features 28 unclad members of the Absolut production team in Åhus, southern Sweden, filmed in various locations, including a winter wheat field (fortunately no cases of frostbite were reported) and the bottling line. The film reaches a crescendo as staff dance bare to the accompaniment of a brass (naked) band.
While hilarious (it’s impressive that so many employees would risk being the butt of a joke), the film has a serious message. Absolut’s CO2 neutral distillation process and the vodka’s sustainable ethos are pivotal to the brand’s philosophy and its marketing.
So much so, that according to an interview with the Financial Times today, even Pernod Ricard CEO Alexandre Ricard got in on the act, appearing in the buff (that’s right, wearing Absolutly nothing at all) for an internal video promoting the new advertising campaign. “I spend a lot of my time as I travel saying that we need creativity and audacity,” he says. “If you want to engage with consumers , you have to be creative and audacious.”
Bravo Alexandre Ricard, bravo Absolut. It might be bare-faced cheek but it’s also Absolutly creative, Absolutly audacious, and Absolutly brilliant.