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Matthew Burns:
Steve, I absolutely love doing this with you.

Stephen Semple:
I know, isn’t this an absolute blast?

Matthew Burns:
It is so much fun. It’s absolutely amazing. God, that’s the most overhanded introduction we’ve ever done.

Stephen Semple:
Except somehow, but you went with absolutely rather than absolute.

Matthew Burns:
I know.

Stephen Semple:
See, what you could have said is, I approached this with absolute amazement.

Matthew Burns:
Guys, you can tell. We want to talk about Absolut Vodka’s absolute dominating ad strategy that started in the 1980s.

Stephen Semple:
Yes.

Matthew Burns:
That’s I want to talk about.

Stephen Semple:
There you go.

Matthew Burns:
We’re going to start playing some of their… And it was a print campaign. It was awesome and Steve really liked it. So I’m going to let Steve start with this one again.

Stephen Semple:
What a brilliant campaign. Now, first of all, the Absolut Vodka bottle was a very pretty bottle. And actually, if you ever actually read the inscription of the bottle, it’s actually really nice copy on the bottle. The bottle’s really attractive. And what they decide to do is create this campaign where they just leaned into the name Absolut. And so you think about they ran this campaign for 25 years and it was constantly a two-word campaign.

Matthew Burns:
That’s it. Two words.

Stephen Semple:
Now, they did a couple that I really like where they were two parters. They had Absolut Security where the bottles in chains. And then Absolut Larceny, the bottle’s gone and the chain is broken.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely great.

Stephen Semple:
And it got so popular that there was memes of it. Well, and the other one that I forgot to share with you is it got so impactful that Smirnoff actually made a big mistake where they actually tried to do one where they were basically spoofing an Absolut ad and it was ridiculous, but basically it goes like this. There’s a picture of Smirnoff and there’s two people talking in the background and it says, “Can a vodka be superficial?” The other person says, “Absolutely.” And then it’s all vodka, no pretense, Smirnoff. You just advertise Absolut.

Matthew Burns:
You advertise for your competitor. Pepsi just screwed that up this last Christmas with trying to run an ad campaign with polar bears in it. What are you doing?

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And on top of that, it wasn’t even right because they said absolutely. They couldn’t figure out a way to make the … Our example, it’s absolute. It’s not absolutely. It’s absolute.

Matthew Burns:
That’s correct.

Stephen Semple:
You’re taking a little bit of more work. Coming back to Absolut. Brilliant campaign. And how can we say how brilliant it is? Well, here’s what ended up happening. When this campaign started in 1980, Absolut Vodka in the United States was selling 10,000 cases a year.

Matthew Burns:
10,000.

Stephen Semple:
Cases a year. By the mid 1990s, 25 years later, they’re selling 4.5 million cases a year in the United States.

Matthew Burns:
I’m not a mathematician or anything like that, but that seems like a big multiple.

Stephen Semple:
That is a big multiple. That’s 4,000% growth. Now it’s over 25 years, but that’s massive in the liquor space.

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
And then what ended up happening, things that I find funny is they were bought by VNS Group for about $8.3 billion. The campaign was immediately canceled because, of course, why would you need the campaign? Why spend all that money? And then here we are a bunch of years later and sales have fallen almost in half.

Matthew Burns:
Well, that’s a typical play. I mean, we see that all the time, unfortunately.

Stephen Semple:
All the time.

Matthew Burns:
When one of our home service companies gets bought out by a private equity group, they immediately cancel all the marketing that made them amazing in the first place. They got the attention in the first place, try to keep all that money for themselves. And then all of a sudden the companies go to business, right? Terrible. Terrible. Shame on that.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. And they’ve let companies like Tito’s come along and Tito’s now sells 12 million… And so this is the other thing is somebody go, “Well, maybe it’s a change of taste.” No, Tito’s is 12 million cases a year.

Matthew Burns:
Yeah. It’s massive.

Stephen Semple:
Right. So Tito’s is bigger than what Absolut was. If Absolut had stuck with this campaign… Anyway, it was funny. It was engaging. There was a point where all you had to say in an ad absolute and you knew what it was. That was the share of mind it had.

Matthew Burns:
Any other word that you wanted to. I mean, they did regional ones where they did Absolut Chicago and Absolut LA.

Stephen Semple:
Absolut LA one’s my favorite one. The Absolut LA one, the pool. It’s fabulous.

Matthew Burns:
I mean, they had so much room, so much breadth to continue doing it where you knew, oh, what are they going to come up with next? Would be one of those things where if you’re… Because again, if it’s a print ad, it’s in newspapers, it’s in magazines, high end magazines, I would assume.

Stephen Semple:
They did a ton of billboards.

Matthew Burns:
And billboards, right? So no, I agree with you. I think there would’ve been more legs and it’s obvious. 25 years. Listen, if something ran 25 years, you could run it longer. I’m just saying.

Stephen Semple:
And when you started that campaign, here’s the other thing is if you sat to somebody, we’re going to do a two-word campaign. In fact, it’s a one-word campaign because we’re only ever going to change one word.

Matthew Burns:
One word.

Stephen Semple:
Would you think that you could run that for 25 years?

Matthew Burns:
Yes. I’m going to say that the average person would say no.

Stephen Semple:
Right.

Matthew Burns:
There’s no way.

Stephen Semple:
But they managed to do it because as you said, because the other thing is once you lean into Chicago, you go, “I can do every city. I can do London. I can do Paris. I can do New York. I can do Chicago. I can do LA. I can do Memphis. I can do … ” Okay, great. That’s a whole genre. Oh, then they had Absolut Warhol. Okay, great. So now I can do Matisse and I can do Rembrandt and I can do …

Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. Well, and like you said, it was working well enough and we’ve talked about this in the past. This happened to Apple’s 1984 and a bunch of other things where then it gets spoofed, which means it’s taken up so much that it’s spooked. And then Smirnoff comes along and they’re like, “Oh, we’re going to eat some of your breakfast.”

Stephen Semple:
Because this whole thing came because I was reading a book on 20 advertisements that changed the world and I came across Absolut. I was like, “Okay, we got to do one on this. ” And then just did basic research on, well, how successful was the campaign?

Matthew Burns:
If you guys don’t know, Steve does Empire Builders Podcast. I think there’s a YouTube channel on it. I think you can get it on almost anything that was Apple or Spotify or anywhere else at the podcast place. The Empire Builders Podcast, if you want to know more about this campaign specifically or the other 250 some odd companies that he’s done the podcast on, you can go listen to those. Awesome. Well, yes, this is a great campaign. Like you said, the visuals were simple, clean, elegant, and-

Stephen Semple:
Fabulous.

Matthew Burns:
And the least amount of words in an ad campaign ever, the name of the company didn’t even say that it’s a vodka, it just says name of the company and then something that’s absolute to them. So brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Well, listen, thank you for that. Guys, if you have any questions about this episode or any other topic that you want us to talk about, reach out to us in the comments. I don’t think I’ve asked for awhile. Subscribe, share, all that good stuff.

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