Five months after its launch, Coffee-mate’s mysterious “The Sudbury Incident” campaign has reached its culmination. Earlier this week, the brand released the Sudbury Incident “documentary” it had been teasing since spring.
The big conclusion: it was an ad campaign all along. Of course, that much was clear from the start, but in a meta twist the faux-doc’s big reveal is simply that the Nestle-Owned brand made the whole thing up.
The four-minute video features Coffee-mate marketing lead Ryan Saunders telling the faux-doc’s director, “I’m sorry to break the news to you in this way, but we made up the whole thing. Yeah…we made it up.”
As Marketing reported in April, The Sudbury Incident launched as a teaser campaign with a series of TV spots. The brand then posted hints about what the “incident” might be on social media via an Instagram page designed to look as if it were run by a documentary filmmaker.
McCann Canada developed the campaign creative.
I watched a documentary, a real one, that was eerily similar to this one except the main character was an Orangutan, and she was chained to a bed in a seedy motel in Malaysia or Indonesia; she arrived there after illegal palm oil plantation owners burned her home, killed her mother and sold her to the reprobate who pimped her out. A seriously disturbing true story which, as there slogan states, was “madewithnestle”
Tuesday, August 30 @ 9:59 pm |