Smirnoff was hidden in plain sight, though recognized, remained unnoticed and unvalued. Our mission: to shift this perception and reveal its true appeal.

With the vodka and RTD categories experiencing significant penetration growth YoY, the Smirnoff trademark was commercially poised for growth, but needed significant brand attention to drive recruitment – and although Globally Smirnoff is very ubiquitous, testing showed that it lacked meaningfulness to it’s LDA-29 audience. It was a monochromatic brand that had over 30+ different campaigns dispersed Globally, with no singular brand identity.

Combined with a huge portfolio of 600+ skus across Global markets, the #1 World’s Vodka had a unique challenge - how to create a relevant Global brand identity, within a flexible framework that allowed for true localisation, creating a meaningful and singular Global brand world.

Budget confidential.

The essence of our digital craft lies in seamlessly integrating the product and people into the core of our message, embodying the brand's ethos of diversity and inclusivity. The Smirnoff bottle takes center stage, becoming the protagonist, framed within a captivating kaleidoscope. Our concept focuses on elevating the product, ensuring its visual appeal unifies the brand across varied markets and product lines. We intricately weave playful kaleidoscope shapes, derived from Smirnoff's labels and flavors, into the design, offering a flawless user experience adaptable to diverse digital environments. Our approach reflects the brand's vibrant personality, showcasing diverse representations to emphasize inclusivity. Ultimately, our digital craftsmanship enhances brand recognition and readability, fostering meaningful connections globally while advancing the brand forward.

We started with the product and made it the star of the design identity, integrating it into the design through playful and bold kaleidoscope shapes, animated and eye catching. Whilst being visually engaging, we ensured the product is always present and the key brand assets are always visible, even if subtly, ie the Smirnoff red eyebrow logo on the bottle.

For the color palettes, we drew these from Smirnoff's hugely versatile bottle labels across their many different flavor offerings, providing a design foundation that is directly intertwined with the diversity of the portfolio, which is just one illustration of the diversity of the brand.

Our design world features appealing, bold contrasts and energy. Kaleidoscopic bottles playfully animate against vibrant color palettes, punchy copy lines, and energizing imagery - ALL tied in to the we do we ethos.

The imagery shows a diverse group of people vibing together, emphasising the power of unity and collaboration. Our imagery includes options of people vibing together holding drinks, but also options where they are not holding drinks, to ensure it's Global scalability to markets with stricter category advertising restrictions. Similarly for these markets, we created a design option that leveraged the eyebrow shape as a border pattern, for markets where the bottle can not be shown. We also feature delicious cocktail shots - always shot in groups to symbolise sociability.

Addressing the Global challenge of a varied portfolio, our design system was successfully scaled Globally by being created fully modular. Every element within each template (product, copy, images, color palettes, serves) is interchangeable, so no matter the market, the key serve, the product, the copy, or the restrictions, our design system is built to adapt.

Through every combination, our system allows for over 9000+ combinations, and was rolled out to 30+ markets.

Ad impact:

Branding: Exceptional branded recall at 86% - 95%

Key results from launch markets:

GB: Source Optimizer

Creative Distinctiveness: 3.04 (significantly higher than norm)

Engagement – 91st percentile ( for 18 - 30year old – 6.6 vs market norm 5.2)

US: Source System 1

5s fluency 63% (vs norm 32%)

Time weighted fluency 80% (vs. norm44%)

Operational results:

Adapt creation costs reduced on average 92% per market, between F23 and F24.

Speed of creative to market increased 2.2x.