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BBDO New York’s Bacardi debut tastes flat

I don’t how booze giants do it. They spend a fortune on advertising, changing strategy left, right and centre, and most of it’s crap. But they still sit proudly atop one of the world’s biggest markets. Diageo’s Johnnie Walker being one case in point.

God knows what will happen when ABInBev completes its takeover of SABMiller. 30 per cent of the world beer market in one giant sticky mitt, mostly brands that taste rotten and nobody likes (the ABInBev part anyway). But they still sit…

Bacardi trumpeted a new global campaign through BETC London a while back, hymning the fortitude of the Bacardi family. Well that should have kept them happy surely. But no, that seems to have been dumped and new agency BBDO New York is back with the usual happy slappy ‘yoof’ guff, slickly produced as you’d expect.

Ah, I get it: they’re millennials!

MAA creative scale: 4.

One Comment

  1. I have to agree with you – having spent 9 years at Bacardi, 5 as VP of Marketing and 4 as President, we have struggled on creative strategy and development ever since we moved to a global footprint in 2006. Part of the issue is in strategy – the briefs have never worked hard enough to uncover a true consumer insight that the Bacardi brand can convert into a benefit. The other part is global executions – the efficiency of a single ad means so many compromises in casting, no face to face interaction, no regionally-relevant executions, that the cumulative effectiveness is low. The answer is much deeper upfront insight development work and testing and a move to regionally-relevant executions off the global strategy.

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