In 2014, Campari handed us the American launch of Aperol. The global work was already running, and it was doing what drinks advertising typically does: selling an iconic product as a hero image or portraying an aspirational lifestyle. In this case, it was a young woman with red hair, among friends, the bottle, the glowing orange drink, mostly on billboards. The brief was to make a version of that for here.
We could have. It would have been easy, and it would have been ineffective, because the problem underneath the brief was one the ordinary answer couldn’t solve. The Spritz was enormous in Italy, and almost nobody in America knew what it was. Low awareness, new market, build the brand. A billboard can announce a bottle. It cannot teach a country a drink.
As always, we went back to the brief and read it again, and again. Sitting inside it were three things the client had mentioned almost in passing, as background.
Aperol had a ritual: a 3-2-1 formula for building the spritz that people learned and then repeated for each other.
The color made strangers ask what you were drinking.
And the client kept using the word infectious to describe how the drink moved from table to table.
Each of these details described a thing the drink was already doing to the people who encountered it. Teaching, prompting, spreading.
Then the target. Millennials, with an eye on people just past legal drinking age, so the brand could grow up alongside them. The generation raised to distrust the billboard and trust the friend, the group text, the table.
We looked at that for a while and said something that felt obvious in the room and reckless on paper. Nobody needs to see another ad for a drink. Especially not this audience.
The ideas we cultivated after that realization sprang out of the client’s own material. If the product is infectious, put it in the medium built for contagion, which in 2014 meant social. And if you are on social with that audience, recognize that you are in a place where people are not looking for advertising. They follow things and join things, and they pass along whatever is worth passing along.
So we didn’t launch a product campaign. We launched a society.
What we actually built
The Aperol Brunch Society had a mantra and a manifesto. It had a way in: order an Aperol Spritz at brunch, and joining was something you did rather than something you clicked. Its social presence came from the Society rather than Aperol, which put the brand in the position of host rather than speaker.
And it had a job attached to it. Campari would hire four Chief Brunch Officers, one each in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Miami, to represent the brand through the summer. You applied by posting an Instagram video making your case and tagging it. The strongest applicants were interviewed, and four of them were hired.
Four strangers, found through a hashtag.
That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part that usually sits at the back of a long list of campaign extensions which never see the light of day, because the brand would have to give up some control. Those applications weren’t sweepstakes entries. People made something, put their name on it in public, and eventually the brand’s presence in its four biggest American markets, during its first real summer here, belonged to four people Campari had recruited through Instagram. The contribution had a consequence.
And for an agency, this was so counterintuitive at the time. Our work was to set the conditions and announce the society and the search. But most of the content people saw was not made by us or our client. It was made by people for other people. Whether they were announcing they were joining the society or promoting why they should be Chief Brunch Officer, this was their narrative, their creativity being passed around, not ours.
It worked. Engagement tripled, and sales rose between 25 and 45 percent across the four target markets.
What came later is harder to assign. The Aperol Spritz went on to become a genuine thing in America, particularly with the people we were talking to. And plenty of that belongs to decisions made inside the company that had nothing to do with us. I won’t claim more of it than is ours. But I have believed ever since that a brand introducing itself through an invitation gets further than a brand announcing that it has arrived.
That was twelve years ago.
The surprising part isn’t that it worked. It’s that work like this still arrives in the world as a special case, a clever thing that ran beside the real campaign rather than a different account of what the campaign could be.
Why nothing much changed
It isn’t a vocabulary problem, because for most of this stretch there was no vocabulary. Nobody in that room in 2014 said the word participation, us included. Ask the industry at the time what the Brunch Society was, and you would have been told a social campaign, or UGC, or a nice stunt. Something tactical. Possibly a brilliant one-off. What went unsaid, by us as much as anyone, was that it had worked by hooking into something people already wanted to do, and that the same thing would work again anywhere that appetite was real.
Nearly everything the approach needed in 2014 has since become ordinary, from creator infrastructure to direct distribution to the ability to convene people without buying an ad spot first. And if you sat in most briefings this month across agencies, you would still hear the client’s ask come out as the ad.
The reason is what it costs.
When you push people toward a brand, you craft, and you control. You choose the frame, the cut, the line, and the last half second of the film. The work leaves the building finished, and its quality is something you can stand next to and point at. Nearly everything the business knows how to reward is built for that.
When you invite people to participate with a brand, you give a good deal of that away. An invitation requires an opening for acceptance, and an opening is by definition the part of the narrative you left for someone else to finish. You build loops rather than endings. You find out what the thing actually is only after other people have been inside it for a while. The craft doesn’t disappear, but it moves down from the surface of the work into the design of the conditions. The work becomes deciding what people are free to change, what they get back for taking part, and whether anything they do alters an outcome. That’s harder to see and much harder to put in a reel.
That trade is real, and I don’t think it helps to pretend otherwise. I still feel the pull toward the finished object. So does most of the industry, and it isn’t a failing. The people making these calls were trained in a period when the finished object was the entire job.
The filing problem
Then there’s what happens to an invitation after it succeeds.
It gets filed. The industry keeps two bins, one marked campaign and one marked activation, and participation lands in the second one almost every time. That sorting isn’t cosmetic. Once something is an activation, it gets activation money, activation timing and activation measurement, and it shows up in next year’s plan as a line beneath the real work. The campaign stays the strategy. The invitation becomes the interesting thing that happened next to it.
This is how twelve years of evidence can pile up without moving anything. Each piece gets logged as an exception rather than counted as a pattern.
You can see the same sorting in how the work gets recognized, though not in the way people usually assume. Recognition was never the problem. The Brunch Society won. Social-native awards shows have rewarded work like it for years, and the award world moved toward results a long time ago, so participatory work cases perfectly well, because the evidence is in what people actually did.
The problem is which lane it wins in. It gets honored as social, or as experience, or as engagement, and the lane it wins in quietly becomes the lane it belongs to. Recognition and reclassification arrive together. A film that wins is the brand’s work. An invitation that wins is the social team’s work.
That’s not a complaint about taste. It’s a description of an incentive structure, and incentive structures are why good arguments lose to mediocre ones for decades at a time.
Some of that is structural, and some of it is what we were raised to value. Most CMOs and creative leaders are still judged on campaigns, on commercials, because that is the history the whole business grew up inside. A creative director takes pride in the ability to craft a story. Far fewer take pride in building an environment where regular people contribute something to a brand. Budgets can be moved in a quarter. Pride takes longer.
Both, not either
Which brings me to something important to note.
This isn’t a replacement. Agencies shouldn’t stop making ads and brands shouldn’t stop wanting them. Push and invite coexist, and plenty of good shops do only one of them perfectly well.
The asymmetry sits elsewhere. What a brand most wants to put out and what the person at the other end most wants to experience have been drifting apart for years, and they are moving in opposite directions. The appetite for being told is going down. The appetite for having something to do is going up. The judgment now is mostly about which side of that gap a given problem sits on, and being good enough at both to be trusted when you argue for the harder one.
Where it gets decided
An agency can only sell what somebody is willing to buy, and most of this gets settled long before the pitch. It gets settled in the brief. Before anyone has an idea, the client has described what it wants help with. How that problem is framed determines how much room there is to solve it.
Aperol’s brief was an awareness brief, which is about as conventional as they come, and the answer still wasn’t an ad. Awareness is a problem. An ad is one answer to it. People can also discover a drink because someone at their table orders one, makes one, or shows them how. If the job is to get more people to know the drink, all of those routes are worth considering. An invitation gives people something to do that brings someone else into contact with the brand.
That possibility gets harder to see when the brief has already named the deliverable. When the brief says film, the work is a film, and everything after that is a conversation about how good the film is. The agency has been asked to make something specific. Asking whether that thing is the best answer to the problem can sound like refusing the assignment.
A lot of marketers describe their own job in ways that narrow the options before the brief even gets written. The brand’s storyteller. The keeper of the narrative. Both of those foreground what the brand will say rather than what anyone will be able to do. If your responsibility is the story, it makes sense to ask an agency for something that tells it.
That matters because the material for an invitation may already be sitting in front of you. If you’re looking for a story to tell, you might see it only as something to mention in the ad.
Campari had already written the invitation, by the way. The 3-2-1 ritual was right there in the brief. It had simply been filed as a product detail rather than as the thing people were going to do with each other.
The ask
So pull up the brief on your desk. Not the strategy deck, the brief.
Find the line that states the challenge. If it asks the team what the brand should say, you will get something to say. That may well be correct, because plenty of problems are answered by something to say, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of amateurism.
But if it asks how to connect with the person at the other end, you have left the door open, and the answer might be an invitation.
That’s the difference, and it’s one line long.
The Aperol Brunch Society was created for Campari America. Campaign details and reported results are on the record at the Shorty Awards.
Loving your overall philosophy and was definitely inspired by the Campari example. I appreciate your wisdom. And so I say this with upmost respect - this article would be even better without the ChatGPT isms. They are great to help get things moving but add so much fluff. Your writing is great, so keep it up.