” … is since the Donkey Kong video game I had never been so apprehensive about a barrel rolling “
While zapping on TV, almost by chance, I came across a very interesting commercial, not so much because of the product but because of its ingenious direction and construction .
I am talking about Kozel beer and its commercial, actually released back in 2021, which advertises you a product but offers you an entire tourist destination. I reproduce below the link where you can watch it.
What is Kozel and its history.
Kozel is a historic Czech beer brand Kozel (1874) and for its launch in Italy, together with Birra Peroni (Asahi Europe) they decided to go big and last year erected on the third week of April, in Milan’s Piazza Gae Aulenti, a large 14-meter-high wooden structure in the shape of a billy goat (in the Czech language “kozel” means billy goat) with a temporary pub inside equipped with tappers for Kozel Lager and Kozel Dark in Milan’s ultra-modern Gae Aulenti Square; just to understand the communicative mood of the most famous Czech beer brand in the World.
Kozel Beer was first brewed in 1874 in the village of Velké Popovice, in the central Bohemian region of the Czech Republic, 25 km southeast of Prague, thanks to the efforts of industrialist Frantisek “Franz” Ringhoffer, who had taken over the historic brewery in the center of the village, dating back to the 14th century. The Velkopopovický Kozel brewery immediately set its sights on reviving the local specialty cerny, a very drinkable dark beer, bock genre. Passing almost unscathed through the two world wars, the beer took the name Kozel (goat) in the 1920s (“bock” means goat in German) taking as its mascot a real goat christened Olda. Even today a descendant of it with four legs, two horns and a beard is kept and displayed in the brewery.
After World War II, the brewery had then been expropriated by the Russian-established communist regime in Prague. It should be noted that it was the first brewery to supply tank/tank-equipped taprooms with tankers. Returning independent in 1991, Kozel had then entered the orbit of Pilsner Urquell and the Sab-Miller Group, only to be sold back (for antitrust reasons) in 2016 to the Asahi Group, the current owner.
A cask: best supporting actor
The star of the commercial is a wooden barrel containing the prized beer, rolling down a slope that never ends along a hamlet that seems to have no temporality. This last detail is quite striking: it could be the 1950s or the 1920s. The barrel is chased by half the town’s population creating unrest in the town; while all this turmoil glues you to the screen an entire town passes before your eyes like a small promotional tour . In the end , the barrel is saved in extremis by a makeshift net created at the moment by a tablecloth .
Last sentence of the commercial . Kozel: there is a village in it.
A commercial that presents an internationally appreciated beer precisely because it combines innovative character with long tradition in beer production, and in the video it shines through in its entirety. Interesting is, however, almost transferring the idea of an entire country working only for that typical product, unique in the World, that i produces only there. A territory made only for Kozel and vice versa.
Therefore, all the products of our Territory come to mind where, although there are brands that guarantee their uniqueness, they do not communicate the work of a Territory, and if they do, they do not show how they came to produce that very drink or food over the centuries. It might serve Kozel’s example to inspire commercial narratives of a product by selling a broader one: the Territory.
I am thinking of our varieties of cheese and meats that have a name, a specification, a P.D.O. mark, a bar code but do not have a story to tell as, say, pocket food or from the particular protein intake for perhaps extinct jobs.
Below is one of our packages created with Artificial Intelligence . Small group with departure September 4, 2022 – BOOK NOW
