- Product/Brand - Peroni Nastro Azzurro
- Spot - Storie de Stile
- Song Title 1 - Poverty
- Composer - Morricone
- Publisher - Warner Chapppell
- Artist - Ennio Morricone
- Record Company - Union Square
- Song Title 2 - Always Something There To Remind Me
- Composer - Bacharach / David
- Publisher - Universal / Warner Chapppell
- Artist - Sandie Shaw
- Record Company - Union Square
- Music Supervisor - Resilient Music
- Ad Agency - The Bank
- Creative(s) - Mat Cowley
- Film Company - The Bank
- Film Director - Ian Cassie
- Post Product - Framestore
- Air Date - May 24 2013
There’s no getting away from it - the majority of beer ads are aimed at blokes.
Indeed we could go further and say that one way or another most of them try to target the latent lout lurking inside every lager drinker.
But not so Peroni Nastro Azzurro. Since Italy’s top blonde beer brand was acquired by London-based brewing giant SAB Miller in 2005, its TV and cinema campaigns have played cleverly on Roman reputation for eye-catching design and retro chic. The idea being that Peroni isn’t just something to be drunk while eating pizza but is instead an authentic Italian brand like Armani or Prada, to be savoured rather than simply swigged!
On screen, at least, Peroni’s long term agency The Bank has always sought to underpin this message with knowingly sophisticated - and most definitely sexy - spots which tap into Italy’s tradition for creating iconic cinema.
It all began in 2006 with a jaw-droppingly expensive execution which spectacularly re-created scenes from the Oscar-winning 1960 movie La Dolce Vita by tempestuous Italian director Fredrico Fellini.
This stunningly-shot black and white spot, directed by The Bank’s Ian Cassie, came complete with a Douglas Dakota, vintage helicopters and look-alike actors playing its stars Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg. Last but not least, it also featured a note-for-note re-record, by top pop producers Bacon and Quarmby, of Baby It’s You, a Burt Bacharach and Hal David song originally released by girl group The Shirelles in 1961 but subsequently made world famous by The Beatles, who included it on their debut album Please Please Please Me two years later.
Now Peroni are back on our screens with another Cassie-directed offering Storie de Stile (Stories of Style) which will once again appeal to Fellini fans thanks to echoes of his semi-autobiographical Roma (1972) and the black, fascist-era, comedy Armacord (1973) releases.
And there’s more Bacharach and David on offer too, in the shape of Sandie Shaw’s 1963 breakthrough hit Always Something There To Remind Me, which can be heard underneath a sequence where a film starlet is seen posing for paparazzi.
According to Richard Ingram, Director of Marketing for Peroni at Miller Brands, this song was selected during the creative development process in August last year prior to shooting which took place just before Christmas.
“The brief was for a well-known, classic, early to mid-1960s song to accompany the new campaign,” Ingram continues. “We wanted something up-tempo, uplifting, light, positive, optimistic, which would be deeply evocative of the era. The Sandie Shaw track proved a perfect fit.”
But, continuing a trend which we saw emerging with last month’s first direct spot, this new Peroni clip also makes use of two separate music copyrights,
since the full length version of the ad actually opens with a 15 second black and white passage depicting the Italian liner SS Rex leaving Genoa on a record breaking Atlantic crossing 30 years before.
For this The Bank and Miller chose a short extract from Poverty, part of the score from Sergio Leone’s 1984 movie about Italian emigrants Once Upon A Time In America by noted spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone.
Richard Kirstein of Resilient Music acted as music supervisor on the project and recalls the inevitable suggestion that a short piece of library music might fit the bill was very quickly discounted.
“The feeling was that, if only subliminally, the extremely high production values in this ad would be somehow cheapened if we couldn’t go for the best music we could get,” says Kirstein, who began work on this campaign in October. “Of course licensing two tracks into one spot does necessitate a larger music budget and tight due diligence to ensure that usage terms across master and publishing rights match for both tracks.”
In this case, Kirstein continues, the fact that the two titles shared the same publishers (Warner Chappell) and the same master rights holders (Union Square) “helped matters considerably”.
Peroni Nastro Azzura’s Storie de Stile campaign is scheduled to run for two years worldwide with cinema as the primary off-line media. But even as most recent figures show that the brand is growing its share of the bottled beer business in the UK, there are currently no plans to air the ad on TV. More’s the pity.
