“Live Life one tea at a time” is New Commercial Arts’ debut line for PG Tips, the famed UK brand now owned by P/E firm CVC. Back in the day it was ‘Tea you could really taste’ with the celebrated/notorious chimps, now cancelled alas.
NCA’s debut riffs an another famous PG campaign, ‘Monkey’ with Johnny Vegas and a monkey mascot, a product of Mother’s fervid imagination as I recall. New monkey is the star of a reality show, hitched to comedy actress Emily Atack.
Elle Barker, CMO of Lipton Teas says: “From the very first conversation we had with NCA, we knew they truly got the heart of the brand and the ambition behind the brief. I’m incredibly proud of the work we’ve created together — it’s bold, funny and absolutely captures the chaos of family life and the role that tea plays for so many British families. ‘Live life one tea at a time’ puts Monkey and the brand back in the spotlight and kicks off a brand new chapter for PG Tips.”
NCA ECDs Dan Seager and Steve Hall add: “It’s been an absolute joy to work with the team at PG Tips. We were eager to create a campaign that did justice to such an iconic, fabric-of-the-nation brand and brought to life the fact that, whatever life throws at you, nothing beats a good cup of PG. And no one knows that better than Monkey. The nation has clearly missed him and persuading him to come back into the limelight has been a career high.”
Tea wars, perhaps surprisingly, seem to have broken out on TV. Reigning champ is Yorkshire Tea with its long-running series featuring stage Yorkshire folk (there’s a Yorkshire everything on TV at the moment: vets, auction houses..even if, as far as I know, they don’t grow tea there.) Courtesy of Lucky Generals. Brooke Bond has also bounced back with Pablo.
At least the current contenders recognise that tea is the ultimate comfort product. I dimly recall a generic campaign ‘Join the Tea Set’ which tried to make the venerable cuppa trendy, with be-flowered hippies and other unlikely all-sorts.
Top book for any FMCG brand and their agency is to enter “culture,” and this is clearly what Lipton and NCA are after here. A promising start.
Still miss the chimps though.
MAA creative scale: 8
