Lipton Debuts Its First Boozy Tea Amid a Crowded Canned Cocktail Market
Campaign from Founders Agency touts the brand's 'obvious' move
In a Venn diagram, would there be much overlap between traditional iced tea drinkers and flavored malt beverage fans?
Maybe a sliver, but the launch campaign for Lipton’s first boozy iced tea aims more at a lake weekend, cooler-toting crowd than the country club, Arnold Palmer-swilling set.
Creatives at Founders Agency leaned into the reputation of the 133-year-old heritage brand for the intro spots, while aiming directly at existing buyers of market leader Twisted Tea and other competitors in the growing hard iced tea category.
The result is the tagline “Your cup of (hard) tea” and a series of ads that say it is an obvious move for the legacy brand to add a 5% alcohol kick to its flagship beverage.
The campaign draws parallels between Lipton’s foray into spiked drinks and the obvious delight of an office drone who gets an unexpected chair swap in “Mechanical Bull.”
In another spot in the series, a guy who wears flippers and swim trunks to a billiards game, mistaking it for a different kind of “pool party,” has obviously misunderstood the invitation.
“The idea was to have the concept grounded in relatability, but then take things to an absurd level,” Katie Reid, senior creative at Founders, who spearheaded the work with Kristin Mizushima, told Adweek. “There’s a lot of power in this very obvious move from Lipton, so we wanted to see how literal we could get with it.”
The campaign, shot in Atlanta this spring, is the first work for Fifco from Founders after winning the business in late 2022. Fifco, the maker of Lipton Hard Iced Tea via a deal with brand owners PepsiCo and Unilever, also handles marketing duties.
As part of that budding client relationship, Founders will now work on another Fifco drink line, Seagram’s Escapes, according to Tanya De Poli, the agency’s founder and COO.
Booze it up
Industry watchers see mostly upside for an entrenched beverage brand like Lipton to try to break into the liquor space. It is part of a trend that has included giants like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and others expanding beyond their soda and juice mainstays, said Deb Gabor of Sol Marketing.
“It’s a me-too move. Everybody’s trying to booze up their offerings.”
Data supports the tactic, with consumers clamoring for hard seltzers, lemonades, kombuchas and other ready-to-drink spirits that make up the flavored malt beverage segment. The drinks more than doubled their U.S. dollar sales in recent years, going from $4.6 billion in 2019 to $9.5 billion in 2022, per IRI Unify.
Hard iced tea, while not as mature as spiked seltzer, is still gaining strength, with players such as Boston Beer Co.’s Twisted Tea leading a pack that also includes entries from Pabst and liquor behemoth Anheuser Busch. Molson Coors plans to drop Peace Hard Tea around Labor Day via a collaboration with Coca-Cola.
On its own, the hard iced tea market racked up nearly $2 billion in global sales in 2021, according to Grandview Research, with the figure expected to reach $14.5 billion by 2030.
Against that backdrop, Lipton’s entry adds up, especially since it may expose the brand to younger, trendier consumer groups, said Gabor, who noted that iced tea has been known historically as “a grandma drink.”
“It seems like an effective strategic expansion of the Lipton brand to attract a new demographic of buyers who have a lot of purchase influence,” Gabor said. “It also allows them to glom onto a fast-growing marketplace trend.”