Older readers may look back fondly on the Taster’s Choice couple — two characters who, over the course of several TV spots throughout the early ’90s, played out their meeting, courtship and marriage. The creatives at Bensimon Byrne have evoked their spirit for a new campaign for one of Constellation Brands‘ wines that merges that kind of good ol’ fashioned love story with a dash of modern online technology.
Amy, an American, and Stefan, a Frenchman, are the central characters of four ads for Clos Du Bois, a California wine made in the French style. After meeting in the wine aisle of a grocery story, the duo cross paths again and again.
The episodic ads appear online, and will be served to viewers in sequential order thanks to micro-targeting and audience analysis technology (with a few bonus episodes of the series appearing at ClosDuBois.com). The characters will also have Twitter feeds to flesh out their interactions.
The campaign targets women 40+. Joseph Bonnici, partner and creative director at Bensimon Byrne, said his team wanted to avoid what have become the tropes of modern wine advertising: shots of vineyards, farms and plaid-shirted vintners lifting wineglasses to the sunset.
“What you’re seeing now is an incredible fragmentation of wine brands,” Bonnici said. “People can get grapes from any vineyard and create a cool wine brand from nothing, just through simple marketing. There’s actually nothing behind the actual grape. But there is something behind Clos Du Bois: California wine with that timeless French winemaking tradition. This is not a brand that’s merely invented. We wanted to make sure these characters were the embodiment of a product truth.”
Correction: In the original version of this article, the first sentence referred to the Maxwell House couple campaign of the 1990s. This was not the correct brand. The North American campaign in question was for Taster’s Choice. Marketing regrets the error.
