No Ugly's response to coalition negotiations between Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters and David Seymour. Photo / No Ugly
As coalition negotiations dragged on deep into November and journalists staked out hotels in the hope of having sweet nothings whispered into their ears by Christopher Luxon, Winston Peters or David Seymour, a Kiwi brand saw an opportunity to pounce.
Drinks company No Ugly responded with a slightly risqué series of billboards declaring, “Not all threesomes are sexy”.
At least one major Auckland mall would order the company to remove the billboard, deciding it wasn’t in good taste to have this creative bit of copywriting above its hallowed retail space.
But this has done little to dissuade No Ugly co-founder Aaron Taylor from sipping on controversy to garner attention – and it isn’t only politicians who get a bit of stick from this brand.
When the Herald reported that drinks brand Ārepa, a major competitor to No Ugly, had been ordered by regulators to publish a notice saying some of its claimed health and performance benefits were unsubstantiated, Taylor responded rapidly.
Within hours of the news breaking, No Ugly had launched digital billboards saying: “The brain drink that doesn’t need a re-think”.
Snapshots of those billboards quickly moved online and sparked a conversation about the merits of cheeky advertising that so openly calls out a competitor.
“It gained momentum,” Taylor says.
“Social media, business media and LinkedIn all sparked a lot of chatter, but I stayed out of that conversation on purpose. I didn’t think participating was wise, but it’s quite cool seeing both sides of the story play out. When you’ve got a cultural conversation that’s kind of topical, it takes care of itself.”
Ārepa founder Angus Brown also largely steered clear of the conversation, but he certainly wasn’t a fan of what No Ugly was doing.
“It’s a bit ugly, isn’t it?” he told the Herald.
“But we’re not bothered by it. We know we are the only New Zealand-made drink with peer-reviewed research on its formula, and we’re focused on continuing our journey to becoming the world’s smartest drink.”
What we have here are two homegrown companies, both looking to grow their brands as big as possible but taking very different approaches to get there.
From a New Zealand Inc. perspective, it’s fascinating to see local brands trying to push the envelope in their own way and getting a little feisty in the process. Whether it is Nike versus Adidas, Lamborghini vs Ferrari, Hilton vs Marriott or Levi’s vs Wrangler, competition often helps to push brands forward into doing interesting things.
A 2020 study by consulting firm Coriolis on behalf of the Government suggested that New Zealand could be exporting five to 25 times more drinks – and that growth in the space will be driven by innovation.
Between 2010 and 2019, we saw an explosion of 71 new beverage firms formed in New Zealand. This is fantastic news for an emerging market, but it means companies have to work hard to cut through the mass of other players in the field.
No Ugly has made the decision to lean into its position as a challenger brand. Not only is the company up against niche health drinks, but it also shares refrigerator space with the many heavily caffeinated energy drinks that can often be seen clutched by teenagers on their way to school.
The long-running problem facing health drinks such as No Ugly is that they simply haven’t had any edge or cool factor. They’ve largely been regarded as the safe option for health nuts concerned about their kidney function.
To see what No Ugly is trying to do, you need to look at another billboard they recently released.
“Less Namaste. More nama-stay out till 3 am,” shouted a recent Victoria Park billboard with a garish green background.
This ad had been created for the company’s Detox product – a concept most often associated with healthy (in other words, boring) living.
What Taylor is trying to do is shift the notion that a drink like No Ugly needs to be pigeonholed in the same health category as Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet.
“Wellness brands have become so sanitised, they’re almost asking you not to do something,” says Taylor, explaining that No Ugly stands in contrast to that idea and aims to make the health and wellness category “fun, interesting and accessible”.
He doesn’t believe these things have to be mutually exclusive.
There’s precedent for what he’s saying. United States company Liquid Death looked at the water category, realised no one was doing anything interesting and responded by putting its sparkling mountain water into a tallboy beer can.
“Most water is boring as s**t,” Taylor says.
“They just decided that it can be like Red Bull and who knows, we might even sell it to children.”
According to Taylor, this problem of boring brands extends well beyond the wellness category.
“I think New Zealand needs a bit of a shake-up at the moment,” he says.
“It’s bloody conservative. Everybody’s risk-averse. I think levity is a great reliever of stress. If you put a smile on someone’s face, they’re going to go ‘S**t, good on you’. I think that’s the key.”
But there’s also risk in trying to coax a smile out of random people on the street. You never know who might end up being offended.
The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) recently found out the hard way that irreverence can land you in hot water with the public. After sharp criticism that a recent video campaign fronted by comedian Tom Sainsbury was insensitive to scam victims, the regulator pulled the campaign and had to issue a sheepish apology.
Even companies quite well-versed in this game of risk, have managed to cross the line.
Tui, a brand built on the irreverence of its ‘Yeah right’ billboards, offended red-headed children, Christians, Kim Dotcom, grieving parents and the gay and lesbian communities throughout the campaign. By 2016, DB Breweries had had enough of the controversy and decided to say ‘Yeah, nah’ to the billboards that gave the brand its fame.
Damon Stapleton, the chief creative officer at the Monkeys, the ad agency behind No Ugly’s new campaign, sees things a different way.
“You can talk about risk, but I think the biggest risk is being boring,” he says.
“[Advertising legend] Bill Bernbach said if no one notices your brand, then everything else is academic. There are a lot of ads on TV that are s**t – and no one ever gets punished for them, because they’re sort of nice. But I think, these days, you’ve got to go for it.
“My old boss John Hunt used to say, you only get a one or an eight – he never gave anyone a ten. You only get a one or an eight. If you’re a five, you’re a one. And I’ve always remembered that.”
Your ad either gets noticed or it doesn’t. It gets remembered or it doesn’t. It gets spoken about or it doesn’t. There’s no in-between. There’s no gold star for a decent effort. There’s no participation trophy.
“How many billboards do you remember from the last time you walked through the city?” Stapleton asks bluntly.
“Now think of all the money spent putting them up.”
Big brands with gargantuan marketing budgets can often afford to run dull ads because they have the financial clout to inundate consumers with their messages over and over again.
There’s growing evidence in marketing and behavioural science showing the power of repetition to embed an idea into a person’s mind, even when they’re not paying full attention.
Smaller brands don’t have that luxury. They can’t out-repeat bigger companies and drown out their messages with an avalanche of dull ads. They have to rely on creativity to embed their brand in the consumer’s memory.
Arguably the best example of a challenger mentality in the New Zealand market would be Hell Pizza. It’s a company that has vied with the giants Domino’s and Pizza Hut since its inception, and it’s done so by pushing the boundaries.
The company has amassed an impressive collection of complaints over the years, but this approach has given Hell a level of attention well above what one would expect, given its advertising budget.
The company has run promotions sending out bullet vibrators with pizzas, tricking consumers into eating fake meat, pinning rabbit fur to a billboard and even telling environmentalist Greta Thunberg to “go to Hell”.
Arguably one of the best ads by Hell in recent years was for “Unruly Tourist Pizza”, which the company warned via a billboard “may contain ants and hair”. This was rapidly rolled out to coincide with the enormous media attention being focused on a family wreaking havoc throughout the country.
The billboard’s power lay in how quickly it was rolled out and then distributed via social media. Those two characteristics of billboard advertising contribute heavily to the decision by No Ugly and the team at the Monkeys to tap into this channel for advertising.
“Out of home is social,” Stapleton says.
“You could do a single billboard in Auckland, but you could reach someone in Dunedin within an hour. If it’s controversial or interesting, you can reach the whole country.”
Taylor jumps into the conversation to add that the rollout of digital billboards across New Zealand means advertisers can now respond within hours if something interesting pops up.
That meant No Ugly could react quickly as the All Blacks made it through to the semi-finals and then the final of the men’s Rugby World Cup, responding first with a risqué reference to being excited about a “semi” and then bidding everyone a good night’s sleep except South Africa.
The Monkeys copywriter Nicholas Dellabarca is responsible for many of the lines that make it onto the No Ugly billboards, and says that being responsive means the company doesn’t have to try to fit into predetermined dates on a calendar.
“Many clients give you a social calendar and go: ‘Write topical stuff for the whole year’. And suddenly it’s like World Cookie Day, and you’ve got an insurance company wanting to do something for Cookie Day. It just doesn’t make sense. For Boxing Day you might have a picture of a cat in a box. It’s just all this random stuff.”
Dellabarca says some brands are desperate to be topical, but rarely have the guts to respond quickly enough to do anything genuinely interesting.
Being controversial is great for attracting attention, but none of that matters if you don’t have a product that people like.
As Stapleton says: “There’s this great quote I’ve always loved: ‘Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising’. If you don’t have a good product, people will know. You’ve got to have the product. That’s like ground zero.”
The only reason a brand like Hell can get away with its irreverence is because people buy the pizza. The same can be said for the likes of Tui, or any other challenger brands that have taken this path.
Taylor knows this and reiterates the company’s science credentials, saying it has employed a food scientist who bases all formulations on ingredients that have shown peer-reviewed results in scientific journals. This is quite different from the approach taken by the likes of Ārepa, which is pursuing the incredibly arduous task of acquiring peer-reviewed research of its formula.
Asked whether his controversial advertising might encourage competitors to start digging into the details of his products, Taylor doesn’t mince his words. “Go for it,” he says.
“We’ve invested heavily in food science … When you’ve got that locked down and you’ve done your homework, then you can be bold. Then you can push the envelope and say things that no one would ever expect because you’ve got nothing to hide.”
Numerous international studies have shown that the fastest growing categories in healthy beverages are low in sugar and offer effects such as increased energy, faster hydration, extra protein or gut health. This is particularly true of millennial-aged consumers who are entering their prime spending years.
What this points to is the likelihood of food battles spilling off the shelves and billboards and into laboratories.
Right now, we’re well on our way to ushering in the age of food-science wars.
- Damien Venuto is an Auckland-based journalist with a background in business reporting who joined the Herald in 2017. He is currently the host of The Front Page podcast.
The event is described as a series of aggressive sales pitches.