stok cold brew

We made an ad that wasn’t good. On purpose.

Because when you spend all your money sponsoring Wrexham AFC’s soccer stadium, you don’t have any money to make an ad to tell people about it. So we made this ad with close to $0 and only b-roll that our intern shot. And instead of shying away from the fact that this is a low budget, poorly done ad, we leaned in, letting people in on the joke to promote our cold brew.

We ran this ad on Hulu to coincide with the new season of Welcome to Wrexham, targeting fans of the team and coffee-lovers alike to better link our partnership together.

 

:30 video

 

Video Screenshots

Instead of a nice, beautiful shot of the stadium, we open with this shaky camera shot on a gloomy day.

We kept the best practice to show product early in the ad, but put it off-center and partially out of frame.

Before showing a clear shot, we showed the shot of our camera still focusing.

To further push bad footage front and center, we kept someone walking right in front of our zoomed-out “hero” shot.

An awkward, blurry shot of our intern cheers’ing and almost missing.

And lastly, using this poor reflection end card to showcase our product, as the VO continued to push our bad ad narrative.

 
 

stok x wrexham afc packaging

We partnered with the soccer club owned by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, but couldn’t say their names (thanks, legal). So we told the story of why a cold brew brand has any business sponsoring a football club in a country full of tea drinkers, and hinted at the owners in a self-aware way.

 
 
 

stok holiday packaging

The holidays are about togetherness. So we got our sh*t together and made a drink everyone else was making, but better. We leaned into the festive spirit with an ugly sweater (ironically putting something warm around a cold brew bottle), we hyped up those that like cold brew in cold weather, and we made fun of ourselves for hopping on this ridiculous trend of holiday flavors—planting easter eggs throughout the packaging, and seeding our tone of voice everywhere possible. Even the legal parts.

 
 
 

website copy

Even projects that seem low lift have big opportunities. We could have taken the quick route to make our website educational, but instead we mixed it with entertainment—sticking to our tone of voice, and making learning about our product just as fun as our high-budget content.