If there is a single thing I thoroughly dislike about alcohol advertising, it is the ideas of authenticity and purity as criteria for choosing a bottle of spirits. They are, essentially, bogus criteria; your whiskey might have been made by a company that’s been around for 200 years, but it’s not been aged for 200 years. You are probably not going to enjoy your vodka shot noticeably more because it’s been octuple-filtered through the only the purest charcoal.
However, it’s difficult to show how a product is fun. When this is attempted – as in Southern Comfort’s “Train” advert – it can be slightly embarrassing, limited (more or less) to pictures of young people having larks, which is one of the more excruciating forms of telling not showing.
This is why the new Smirnoff poster ads are so good. They show something that’s fun about spirits (making cocktails) and, throughout the series, what’s fun about vodka in that context (the ability to make many different cocktails).
Martini glass :
Short glass:
Highball glass:
There’s still the “Extraordinary purity in every drop” slogan, but the images give more of a reason to believe what that means – every drop is like a tiny cocktail. It’s not purer in the sense of cleaner, but purer in the sense of more like vodka.