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Finnish Company Outwits Liquor Advertising Ban By Using Gloomy Skies To Promote Product

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Hartwall Original Long Drink

Restrictive liquor laws lead spirits companies to do their best to work with – or work around them entirely – and one innovative Finnish company figured out a way to use the natural weather in Finland to advertise their product.

To understand Hartwall Original Long Drink and the company’s 'Greyest Day of the Year' advertising campaign, you’ve got to understand a few things about Finland – particularly, the country’s unofficial natural drink, its dark skies and its restrictive liquor laws.

Let’s start with Hartwall. The drink was created for the Olympic Games in 1952, which were held in Helsinki. A mix of Finnish gin and grapefruit soda, it was created as the world’s first bottled mixed drink to help the Finnish bartenders serve vast amounts of visitors to the games, the company says. It was intended only to be served for the duration of the games, but the Finns liked it so much, production continued, and it’s considered the unofficial, national drink of Finland.

It’s also slightly gray in color, perhaps the tint of cloudy skies, and Finns call it “concrete,” “cement,” and simply “grey,” and the Finns use the English spelling of the word. As in, telling your bartender “I’ll have a grey,” and everyone in Finland will know exactly what you mean.

The Finns not only like their drinks gray, they also often dress in gray tones, and, well, their skies are gray, particularly in November. Hartwall teamed up with Foreca, a meteorological services provider in Finland, to survey the grayness in weather among European countries, and their joint report determined that Helsinki was the grayest capital in Europe, and gray skies peak in the middle of November, just before the snow flies. At this time of the year, not only are the skies somber, but as little as five hours of sunlight can be had from dawn until dusk.

Armed with this knowledge, the folks at Hartwall decided to turn this particularly gloomy time of the year into a national celebration that embraces the greyness so they created 'The Greyest Day of the Year,' which was celebrated on Nov. 17. “The Greyest Day of the Year combines two things that are uniquely Finnish: gray weather and gray drinks,” says Eeva Ignatius, marketing manager for Harwall. “We wanted to bring these elements together in the form of a new national celebration and raise a glass to our gray national weather.”

The holiday was created not only to bring light to an otherwise dreary time of the year, but also to use the natural gray skies as a marketing motif for Hartwall. But getting the word out about booze in Finland can be tricky – liquor companies can’t advertise on billboards or any public spaces, they can’t air television advertisements before 10 p.m., and they can’t even use social media to promote themselves, due to an amendment toan alcohol advertising law the Finnish Parliament passed in 2015.Hartwall-AD-2

So, they did a print campaign, put together a video online, and did displays in stores where Hartwall is sold. And word got out – people started talking about their own personal “Greyest Day of the Year” celebrations on social media, businesses started opening their terraces for parties, and other companies started joining in on promoting the holiday.

The biggest party was sponsored by Hartwall, as a large outdoor concert was held at Helsinki’s Alla Sea Pool, which is right next to the presidential palace (which you may have seen on the news, as that’s where Trump and Putin met).

Advertising alcohol in outdoor spaces poses a challenge in Finland,” Ignatius says. “However, with The Greyest Day of the Year campaign, Hartwall Original Long Drink turned Finland’s grey weather into the world’s largest outdoor ad.”

Hartwall Original Long Drink

The campaign was a success, Ignatius says. After the celebration, a survey revealed that the association between Hartwall Original Long Drink and the grey color strengthened, as more than a fifth (23 %) of Finns associate the grey color of the sky with Hartwall. A third of Finns recall seeing the campaign, and  a third of those (400,000 people or 10 percent of those of legal drinking age) are already planning to celebrate the holiday again next year the third weekend in November.

“We wanted to embrace something unique to Finland and to the Finnish state of mind, and to do it in a creative way,” Ignatius says. “The campaign was a success, and Finns related strongly to our concept.”

Though the drink is found throughout Finland, it’s also available in 11 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Japan, and Ghana, but it’s not exported to the United States.

 

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