COSTA COFFEE LAUNCHES FIRST BRAND TV ADVERTISING

Not all coffees are created equal

Tonight (7^th October) at 8:45pm Costa Coffee will launch its first ever TV advert in an innovative and humorous execution that breaks with the conventions of a long line of traditional coffee advertising.

The campaign follows the success of Costa’s first national marketing campaign in 2009– the controversial ‘7 out of 10 coffee lovers prefer Costa’ taste test which, following several months of complaints from Starbucks, culminated in a landmark ASA ruling in Costa’s favour in July this year.  The new campaign will feature the strapline ‘For Coffee Lovers’ a celebration of this conclusion.

The campaign titled ‘Monkeys and Typewriters’, focuses on the well-known theorem that if you give a room full of monkeys typewriters, they will eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare.  So, the voice of actor Bill Nighy provokes, ‘can a room full of monkeys produce the perfect cup of coffee?’

The answer is a resolute no as the film opens on an individual monkey and pans out to reveal a futuristic room filled with monkeys in front of coffee machines.  We see the monkeys tentatively trying to work the machines with a gradual descent into chaos.

Concluding with cinematic shots of a Costa barista hand making the perfect cup of coffee the advert illustrates that good coffee is not born from luck but can only be created when hand- made with passion by a highly skilled and trained expert baristas at Costa.   

Premiering at 8:45pm during Coronation Street on ITV 1 the ad will run for 4 weeks across national terrestrial and multichannel in both 60 and 30 second formats and will be accompanied by print and online executions.

Supporting press activity will run in national newspapers featuring bold, confident headlines stating that ‘not all coffee is made equal’ and that Costa is on a ‘mission’ to save the world from mediocre coffee.  An online campaign will also accompany.

Jim Slater, Marketing Director for Costa, comments: “Costa is enjoying double-digit like for like sales growth, and we aim to continue this great momentum. Independent surveys consistently prove that coffee lovers prefer Costa, and this TV commercial will help us to explain the reasons why.”

Costa continues to trade strongly with owner Whitbread announcing a 28% growth in sales and 8.3% in like for like for the 24 weeks to 19 August 2010.