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Dry humour pays off as Old Mout wins December Ad Impact

Old Mout Cider has nabbed a Colmar Brunton Ad Impact award for the month of December for its ‘not so sweet’ Hard Cider ad via Colenso BBDO, which the market research company says stood out from the noise of Christmas ads throughout the month.

In the ad, a guy named Tommy walks into a Nelson bar and orders an Old Mout Hard Cider. Just as he goes to take a sip as an omniscient voice that all the characters can hear continuously interrupts him, giving him, basically, a ‘hard’ time.

The idea behind the ad is that this new, dryerD cider, just like the voice, is ‘not so sweet’, as the tagline reads, and is an attempt to get add men’s purchasing power to the ever-growing cider market.

Colenso creative Simon Vicars said earlier the concept for the ad came from ‘The Gunfighter’ clip starring Nick Offerman, shot by LA-based director Eric Kissack (who has also worked on The Dictator and Horrible Bosses 2).

The creative team at Colenso were able to work with Kissack on developing the ad campaign for the Old Mout Hard cider launch.  

A Colmar Brunton release says on the ad:

“The Old Mout Cider ad stood out to consumers by being particularly different to other cider brands and innovative with its use humour to convey its story as the ‘not so sweet cider’. In turn this has created a lot of talkability around the ad for viewers, with many saying that it was the sort of ad they would talk about with friends.”

Sean O’Donnell, the head of domestic beer and cider at DB Breweries and his team contacted Colenso BBDO and set about developing the new cider product that matched the taste preferences of male consumers and which also had a visual identity that would stand out on supermarket and liquor store shelves, he said earlier.

“We started by looking at names and concepts, and then once we landed on Old Mout Hard cider, we took a range of liquids and tested that at a quantitative level with a significant number of consumers. We tested three different versions and made some subtle changes to make sure we had something that consumers would like. It’s been one of the more extensive research projects we’ve run.”

The result was a dry cider presented in packaging that would be more akin to that usually found in the beer section. 

Much like the packaging and the brand identity, the final ad feels more like a beer ad than one that would be associated with a cider—and Colenso business director Brodie Reid says this was an intentional move. 

“The biggest barrier for males to drinking cider is that it’s too sweet,” says O’Donnell.

This perception has led to the cider market in New Zealand lagging well behind international markets in terms of household penetration. 

“At the moment only one in four Kiwi adults drink cider. And if you compare that to the UK or Australia where 60 to 70 percent of the population drink cider, there’s clearly huge growth opportunity for the category [in the local market].”

Runners up for the award were two seasonal ads that the Colmar Brunton release says elicited a strong emotional response from viewers, as a result of the style of the creative.

Second place was Air New Zealand’s ‘Santa’s Workshop’, where elves were hard at work in the airplane hangars to help Santa prepare for Christmas.

In third place was Lotto’s ‘Christmas promotion’ which told a story of a little girl’s parents creating her dream treehouse for her to wake up to on Christmas morning.  

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