Zero? Like a Limoncello Zero
The actual problem
The no-alcohol category is the fastest-growing thing in spirits and it comes with a communication problem attached like a barnacle. Zero-alcohol advertising has a default register, and that register is wellness. Soft focus. Someone laughing on a rooftop at golden hour with a glass they never drink from. A voiceover about intention.
Nobody has ever ordered a drink because of a voiceover about intention.
The other trap is worse, and it is the one an Italian distillery walks into blindfolded: sell to America by turning up the Italy. Sunset over the vineyard. Nonna. A mandolin, unprompted.
So the brief for the sketches came out as a single sentence. Make Americans laugh, in American, about drinking nothing.
We did not write it ourselves
This is the part we would like to be smug about and cannot.
Italian comedy does not survive translation into a fifteen-second American ad. The rhythm is different, the setup length is different, the thing that constitutes a punchline is different. We could have written these in Italian, translated them well, and produced four films that landed at roughly the temperature of a firm handshake.
Instead we handed the writing to an American. All the scripts are by Joseph Young, written in English, for an audience that was never going to be us. Some of the cast are American too. This is the least glamorous creative decision in the entire project and it is the one that made the films work.
The comedy runs on a single mechanism, repeated: take something absurdly high-stakes and attach it to something that has no stakes at all.
So yes: we said Zanin is not here to do the Italian thing, and then built a film entirely out of the Italian thing. The difference is who is doing it. The bottle is not performing Italianness. The American is. The bottle just makes him better at it.
No rooftop. No mandolin.
Where it went
The campaign was built for the American launch and pointed at Bar Convent Brooklyn, the trade fair where the US bar world decides what it is going to pour next year.
Two square metres of stand. That is what you get. Two square metres, in a hall full of people shouting, against brands with budgets that would fund our next three years. You do not win that room with a bottle on a plinth. You win it with something that makes a stranger stop walking because they heard other people laughing.
The zero-alcohol line now ships to the US and the category is still growing faster than anything else on the shelf.
FAQ
What is the Zanin Zero campaign?
A set of comedy sketch films produced by Onymous Studios for the Zanin 1895 zero-alcohol line (Amaro Zero, Bitter Zero, Limoncello Zero, Aperitivo Zero), created for the launch of the range in the United States.
Why was it written by an American writer?
Because comedy does not survive translation. The scripts are by Joseph Young, written in English for a US audience, with US casting, so that the timing, the setups and the punchlines work natively rather than arriving pre-translated.
Can Onymous Studios make a campaign for a market that isn't ours?
Yes, and we would rather bring in writers and performers from that market than translate our way into it. Contact studios@onymous.it.
Two square metres, a hundred and thirty years, and zero percent.
Contact us.
