Southern Comfort: ShottaSoCo
Agency: Weiden + Kennedy Year: 2015 Role: Art Director and Photographer
Creative Directors: Jimm Laser and Caleb Jensen Copywriter: Luke Sacherman Producer: Alison Hill
How and Why?
Southern Comfort believes in people who are comfortable with themselves. This campaign is a study in personal confidence. In the past, we’ve tried to make heroes out of ordinary people who aren’t afraid to like what they like.
But people still don’t know how to order Southern Comfort. A shot of Southern Comfort is an easy order and we’re trying to make it easy for our drinkers. So we made up a word, ShottaSoCo.
Confidently Comfortable.
In addition to SHOTTASOCO becoming a new bar call (as well as a verb, adjective, expletive, hashtag, and triumph of humanity), we sought to make SHOTTASOCO famous. So we hired a hilarious celebrity and created the most confidently comfortable character Danny McBride has ever played: a jet-setting, club-jumping playboy behind the summer’s biggest song.
Once we created his new persona, we launched authentically by partnering with one of today’s biggest music producers to make a hit song, called “ShottaSoCo.” Then we made a music video for it, starring Danny. The entire thing played out like a proper song release: Media, PR, and an artist page on Spotify where it organically topped the Global Viral Charts.
The Music Video
McBride just finished performing for some extremely wealthy people at a party in Dubai. He killed it. Now it’s time to go. He’s got somewhere to be – a club in Miami. And he needs to get there before sunrise.
Pitchman
McBride the “artist” in a series of digital videos promoting the word.
This ran in Southern Comfort’s digital ad spaces.
Behind the Scenes
We discovered that the process of making McBride was as entertaining as than the actual content, so we released a video documenting how this campaign came to life.
ShottaSoCo: Animated Shorts
After the dust settled on McBride’s production we found that we still had 15k left in our budget. Upon learning this, we immediately spent it. Collaborating with our friends Next Media Animation (who also produced the music video) we created 5 computer generated animated videos which all said the same thing, ShottaSoCo.
