Yesterday, Newsworks’ Tracy De Groose spoke to Digiday’s Lara O’Reilly about blocklists.
In 1996, Tracy De Groose became brand director for Stella Artois in the U.K. She inherited the lager’s long-running “Reassuringly Expensive” campaign, inspired by the French period movie “Jean de Florette” and starring a flower seller named Jacques as the central protagonist.
Such was the cinematic nature of the creative, De Groose decided it didn’t make sense for the ads to appear in football games and the “News at 10” ad breaks — then the go-to destinations for beer advertisers wanting to reach large audiences of men on TV. Instead, the Stella team overhauled the media plan so the campaign would only be surrounded by movies on TV or in film magazines like Empire. Stella was the 23rd largest U.K. grocery brand in 1997 and grew to become the fifth largest by 1999, according to AC Nielsen data cited by Marketing Magazine.
