Angry Orchard Goes Unfiltered
tv | stunt | social

For the launch of Angry Orchard’s Unfiltered Cider, my team and the good people at Boston Beer Company took an equally unfiltered approach to advertising by filming a TV spot and releasing the very first take, no matter what. An ambitious mark by any production standard, except this spot needed to take place in the company’s real-life orchard and star their head cider maker, Ryan Burk, a craftsman who loves cider and has very little patience for selling it on camera. Super chill 👌

refreshingly honest advertising

For years, Angry Orchard had positioned itself as the “naturally refreshing choice for life’s chill moments,” failing to assert much of a POV. With a new CMO at the helm, we set out to change this stance with Unfiltered as our inaugural campaign. As a team, we took a hard look at the definition of “unfiltered” to understand what it meant to coming from our brand. The path we chose was one forged by honesty, calling BS on not just the assumption that cider is too sweet, but the medium as a whole—advertising.

an unfiltered sense of humor

My role in the campaign, in addition concept development, was to write the TV spot itself, help craft PR materials to tease the campaign, and script a series of short vignettes that let me use unfiltered humor to tell a product story beyond the hero spot.

taking brand voice into new territory

In the :15 TV spot, we catch Burk at the tail end of an overly-produced TV shoot, leaving behind the phony, saccharine world of advertising in favor of a more candid approach. Ultimately, this was a reflection of Angry Orchard’s foray into a totally new brand persona—one that was playfully confrontational with a healthy dose of humor.