A wine importer came to us wanting a brand campaign. They had no shops, no shelf presence and no media budget worth the name. A conventional campaign would have spoken to people who could not buy from them, which is an expensive way to be ignored.
Inventory your owned surfaces first
They had one extraordinary asset: a hand on every bottle that reached a restaurant table. That is a surface at the exact moment of consumption, with no auction, no impressions and no competing message. It costs the price of printing.
Owned surfaces are usually undervalued because they are unglamorous, not because they are ineffective.
- Packaging, at the moment of use rather than purchase.
- The receipt, the delivery box, the confirmation email.
- Waiting rooms, vehicle sides, uniforms, invoices.
- Anything the customer holds while deciding whether to come back.
Then make it a format, not a burst
The version that keeps paying is a format the client can re-run without us. Nine numbered tags over nine weeks became something restaurants collected and pinned up, and it has been re-commissioned every season since. A campaign that ends is a cost. A format is an asset.
