One of the best drinks ads isn’t even a drinks ad.
Friday. Payday. End of the month. The group chat has been building since lunchtime, everyone's out and for a few hours it's the best night anyone's had in months. Then, somewhere around three, the kebab shop starts calling and nobody puts up a fight.
That's exactly where one of the best drinks campaigns I've seen in a long while took me. And it isn't even from a drinks brand. It brought back a good few late nights from my years in London, but I'll save those stories for the pub.
KOKO is a historic music venue and a genuine cultural landmark in Camden, and it's seen it all: Charlie Chaplin and the Sex Pistols, Prince and Armand Van Helden. These days it has a private members' club backstage and a big, shiny disco ball over the dancefloor. And this year, it's celebrating 125 years.
Now, you could forgive them, or any brand with that kind of culture and heritage behind it, for marking a birthday as big as 125 with a campaign all about themselves, the stage, the legends, the dancefloor. Most brands would have. KOKO didn't.
Instead, they made the whole thing about the kebab shop at the end of the night and everyone who's ever ended up in one.
Directed by Eoin Glaister, it's set in a fictional Camden kebab shop. Behind the counter stands a long-suffering owner who has been feeding clubbers for decades and remembers every era of them, each a little stranger than the last. Watch closely and you'll catch DJ Boring as an eighties punk.
Even the teasers joined in. Before the film landed, flyposters dressed as takeaway menus went up on walls across London, each with a mystery number on it. Ring it and you got clues to who was playing KOKO this season.
The whole campaign speaks fluent 3am.
It works because it hands you something you already have. Anyone who's had a big Friday night has stood in that queue under that strip light, weighing up chips or no chips. Spicy mayo or extra mayo. The film only sketches it in, and you fill in the rest with your own nights and your own mates.
Plenty of brands get remembered by shouting about their own history, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the ones that really stick don't shout — they show up in yours. A roll call of legends is something you watch. A kebab at the end of the night is something you've lived.
Binet and Field's IPA data has long shown emotional campaigns are roughly twice as likely to deliver long-term profit growth as rational ones. Because emotion is how memory gets built. And the shortest route to emotion is often the one people already carry.
It's also why this is one of the best drinks campaigns I've seen lately. It sells the feeling many a drinks brand chases, the great night out, and gets there through the culture around it.
KOKO understood that its best material wasn't just inside its own walls.
Brands often assume people care about their occasions, the milestones that matter inside the building. Some do. But the brands that really last live beyond their own walls too, in moments people can actually relate to, just like a kebab shop at the end of a Friday night, whether that's in Camden or Preston.
That holds for any brand with a big moment of its own to mark, and most have one coming.
Come Monday, the group chat will be full of the night itself, the set and who ended up where. The kebab shop will get just as many messages. For KOKO, that's the whole point.
Most marketing spends its money telling people who a brand is. The brands that get remembered do something harder: they find where they already sit in people's lives, and turn up there. Get into a moment people come back to week after week, and you get remembered every time they do. That's memorability you don't have to keep buying.
So the next time some of them are stood under that strip light at two in the morning, a little bit of KOKO will be stood there with them.
Happy 125th, KOKO. Mine's a large doner.
At The Behaviours Agency, we spend our days helping brands fight forgettable. Making them more memorable, undeniably relevant, and totally un-ignorable. If you've got a big moment on the horizon, or you just want yours to turn up in more of other people's, let's talk.
