South Africa has a very strong casual drinking culture which has, unfortunately, lead to over 1,000 alcohol-related deaths on its roads every month.

Although drinking and driving messaging is everywhere, the general apathy towards drinking and driving has rendered most messaging in this field obsolete.

As South Africa’s biggest alcohol retailer, TOPS at SPAR fully understands the role that it plays in greater South African culture and we wanted to put out a message that showed our commitment towards responsible drinking in South Africa.

But as South Africa’s ‘fun friend’, we knew we had to create something quite hard-hitting in order to punch through.

South Africa has a very strong casual drinking culture which has, unfortunately, lead to over 1,000 alcohol-related deaths on its roads every month.

Although drinking and driving messaging is everywhere, the general apathy towards drinking and driving has rendered most messaging in this field obsolete.

So, in order to break through, we focussed on the long-term ‘aftertaste’ that a person would have to live with as opposed to the immediate aftermath of a drinking and driving incident,

Using the testimonies of both victims and perpetrators, we partnered with various illustrators to create a series of unique ‘Aftertaste’ alcohol labels that essentially ‘bottled’ evenings gone wrong in vivid and disturbing detail and spoke to the devasting aftertastes that a drinking and driving incident will leave its victims with.

By moving away from the immediate tangible consequences and instead focussing on the long-term anguish that both victims and perpetrators are left with, we were able to change the conversation from ‘Will I get caught?’ to ‘Will I be able to live with myself?’.

We decided to use ‘taste’ as a differentiator as the idea of an everlasting alcohol aftertaste was a well-understood metaphor across all of South African society.

Combining photos and illustration we created four bespoke bottle labels that spoke to four different alcohol market segments.

We then digitally added foiling and lighting effects before placing our labels in dreamlike landscapes that spoke to the aftermath of a road accident.

The landscapes were created digitally in order to match the mood and backstory of each of the labels.

The campaign worked exceptionally well in South Africa as it eschewed traditional drinking and driving messaging and rather focussed on the long-term effects of bad decisions.

Our unique campaign hashtag #AvoidTheAftertaste trended on Twitter; we reached 6.2 million people online and saw an ROI of 1177%.

Aftertastes was a gut punch to a nation that, very much, lives in and for the moment and generated much online and mainstream media debate during the campaign period. Our creative was also featured in several online publications during the campaign period.