Who: Okanagan Spring Brewery and One Twenty Three West.

What: A new summer marketing campaign, “Taste of Okanagan.”

When & Where: The campaign broke on June 22 and is running through September. It’s a digitally focused campaign built around :30, :15 and six-second ads, as well as in-feed social and Instagram Stories.

Why: Pretty straightforward, really. It’s summer, which means beer-drinking season, and Okanagan wants to be part of the consideration set in a highly competitive category.

How: All of the creative is built around the idea that cracking open one of the brewer’s products can immediately transform drinkers into an “Okanagan-ready” version of themselves.

The main 30-second spot features a group of friends hanging out in their backyard, only to be have their clothing and furniture whisked away and replaced by summer garb, giant floaties, etc. The creative concept is extended to Instagram Stories, where tapping the screen immediately transforms a chair into a paddle board, etc.

The spot shows the friends all sitting apart from each other in an apparent nod to social-distancing protocols, but was actually shot long before the current crisis. “The ads seem to have a bit of a ‘stay-at-home’ message, but were shot in the summer of 2019, well before the COVID pandemic,” says Okanagan Spring’s senior marketing manager, Nick Phillips.

And we quote: “We are very proud to brew our beer in the Okanagan, and we wanted to focus on extending that feeling to other parts of B.C. This campaign does that by recreating that ‘OK Times’ feeling, and bringing it to people’s homes—whether inside their house, backyard, patio or wherever they’re comfortable cracking open a nice cold brew.” —Nick Phillips, senior marketing manager, Okanagan Spring.