How to build a global brand campaign in the attention economy: inside Born to Mix Season Two

Building on its success, it’s time for Born to Mix Season Two, an extension of the story designed for multiple platforms and markets, leveraging the power of fresh creative talent and the distinct characteristics of iconic Absolut cocktails.  

We spoke to Project Lead Victor Mangematin and Communications Strategist Thomas Eon. They explain how they took Born to Mix to the next level, balancing the delicate process of creating a mammoth campaign equipped to succeed across borders and platforms, while still retaining a unified, distinctly Absolut core.

Season One of Born to Mix was a hit. Season 2 raises the bar. What lessons shaped this next chapter?

Victor: We set out to retain what worked well in Season One, especially the idea of humanizing the brand by personifying cocktails. Absolut has a rich and layered brand message, but these layers can sometimes be complex to communicate with immediacy. So, when translating it into a campaign, we needed a narrative that felt instant and accessible. The key was to convey emotion in a way that was both wordless and universally understood, something that resonates within seconds across global markets.

To support this, we started by creating a strong visual core. We explored the most effective and simplified way to express the brand’s look and feel, ensuring the bottle remained iconic, without losing the warmth and emotion.

With that foundation in place, we built in layers of complexity, tailored to each channel. This approach gave us a consistent creative base, high brand attribution, and the flexibility to adapt storytelling across the ecosystem.

Thomas: And not just across channels — but across markets. As a global brand we have many different markets with different levels of maturity and requirements.

Born To Mix: World of Absolut Cocktails is a drinks-first campaign designed for seamless activation across all markets — including dark markets — with a hero asset, agile short formats, and a unified blend of lifestyle and product content across every channel. Markets can pick the cocktail they want to highlight and then have a suite of assets at their disposal. 

This modular approach — refined after a first season that revealed certain limitations — provides the perfect base for each market’s unique marketing mix. It takes care of the heavy lifting — giving them the space to follow up with bolder, more inventive local activations.

Victor: Speaking about different cocktails, a major breakthrough for us was realizing the power of cocktail characteristics and how much more relatable and recognizable they are than individual characters. They are timeless whether personified by a person, expressed through a cocktail, a color, or a movement. This approach allows us to carry those same characteristics across the full ecosystem: from lifestyle to product, with different levels of depth and storytelling. It’s not about choosing one or the other, but about building cohesion across all touchpoints.

How do you land on the right approach for a campaign this big? Is it all about extensive workshopping, or does the right idea just click?

Victor: The core of the campaign was created with full cross functional collaboration. This was a valuable exercise to align understanding and gather needs from not only comms and markets but also Social, Digital, Shopper, PR, E-Com and more.

We also did a lot of research which was twofold. The first is external which included research on how the first campaign performed for Absolut as a brand, as well as recurring testing to allow for iterative asset optimization during campaign development. 

The second was internal and maybe less common. We spent a lot of time and energy listening to our creative content managers and other specialists in different markets, understanding their challenges and potential hurdles when it comes to adaptations in previous campaigns.

We often deliver plug-and-play assets, but we know markets sometimes need flexibility. If the creative foundation is too rigid, it can limit what they can do. So, we always aim to balance effectiveness with consumers and shoppers with usability for local teams, making sure our campaigns are both impactful and easy to activate.

Thomas: Speaking about research, one thing we know for sure is that most people only do plus one mixes. This campaign invites people to explore an amazing, deeper world of cocktails and not miss out. 

How did you decide upon the cocktails to highlight in standalone assets this season? 

Victor: When I first joined Absolut, someone said, “People don’t buy vodka, they buy cocktails”, and that really stuck with me. It’s true and it shaped our approach.

The goal became not just to connect cocktails to Absolut, but to connect them to emotion. So, we asked: which cocktails are the most universally understood and relevant in our category?

We identified seven with four as main protagonists, based on their strategic importance, global popularity, and the breadth of characteristics they represented. This gave us a diverse and emotionally rich cast to build the narrative content around.

Beyond the storytelling layer, we developed an extensive suite of functional assets, from how-to-mix videos to stills, all within the same creative universe. This allowed us to scale and adapt the campaign flexibly across channels and markets.

Thomas: Absolut’s strength is our versatility; we’re the perfect base for endless creativity. This is both a strength and a weakness. We don´t “own a cocktail”, neither do our competitors. Because cocktails have boomed globally, most vodka brands seize upon them to try and elevate their product. It’s difficult to stand out. The real challenge was not about which cocktails to highlight but more about how to speak about them in a way only Absolut can. And the answer to that is by connecting cocktails to culture. Since our launch in 1979, Absolut has championed mixing not only in cocktails, but in ideas, culture, people, and perspectives. In a contemporary world where brands are often chasing culture, we were the OG cultural mixer instead.

Could you explain the role of the dance battle as a motif in the Season Two campaign and why it was chosen? 

Victor: We chose the dance battle because it felt like the most expressive, joyful, and instantly recognizable way to bring our core idea to life: the mix of people, cocktails, cultures, and ideas.

For me, it brought back memories of my first high school parties, that moment when someone pushes you into the circle and suddenly, you’re in it, heart racing, doing something you didn’t think you could. That rush of expression, of letting go… it’s so human and recognizable, whether you’ve experienced it or not.

Dance battles carry that same energy. They’re everywhere: from TikTok to street corners to the Super Bowl, and they speak across generations. My son and my grandmother can both recognize what’s going on in a dance cipher. No words needed. And that’s the beauty of it: dance lets us communicate emotion, tension, and release without dialogue — which is exactly what we needed to build a campaign that travels. It’s a visual language. And it gave us the perfect way to personify each cocktail and their characteristics, not in a literal way, but through movement, rhythm, and connection. It made the story feel alive.

The creative lineup this season is really impressive, spanning choreography, video direction, music, and dance. What made you want to work with them? 

Thomas: Season Two further elevates Absolut as the cultural mixer. From music artist and choreographer to director and dancers, the campaign was created to stay authentically plugged into the pulse of youth culture.

Directed by acclaimed music video visionary Henry Scholfield and choreographed by renowned movement artist Shay Latukolan, the campaign features a diverse ensemble of world-class dancers — from The Greatest Showman to Jungle.

For the music, we tapped into a track everyone knows: En Vogue’s Free Your Mind. But we gave it a twist by briefing rising producer Channel Tres to create something bold and fresh. The result? A banger that sticks with you long after you’ve heard it — proof that Absolut stirs up more than just cocktails.

The visual assets make an instant impact. Was it a conscious decision to hand-craft assets for the short video era, where the attention economy is so competitive? 

Victor: Yes, we were very intentional about designing every asset to stand on its own, keeping in mind most people will never see the full campaign narrative. We started by defining a clear hierarchy: are we storytelling, or are we driving product and cocktail visibility? That helped us shape each piece with purpose. You can’t tell the full Born to Mix story in three seconds, but you can convey emotion, energy, and brand identity instantly. That’s where the dance battle motif and bold visual style really worked for us. We didn’t just cut down longer films to fit formats. We built bespoke assets for each platform, designed to land with immediacy.

One key shift from Season One was putting the cocktails front and center. Even in character-led scenes, the drink is the hero. Crafted to be both visually iconic and emotionally irresistible in films and key visuals alike.

Influencer activation is also a big part of the campaign plan: what is the process of finding and selecting the right influencers? 

Victor: A creative mindset is most important. That’s the centre-point that we’re building off. In our main videos, dancing is a visual mechanic to be able to show creativity in a voiceless way. But when you work with influencers, you have other opportunities to talk and convey the message of Born to Mix that doesn’t need to involve dancing.

The most important thing when we work with influencers is to convey the idea of Born to Mix through the characteristics of our cocktails. For our main hero film, dancing was the best vehicle for that. But somebody doing amazing nail art, for example, could still be able to translate the idea of the characteristics of the Espresso Martini to underline Born to Mix.

A huge amount of work has gone into crafting Season Two, any final personal reflections or takeaways you’d like to share? 

Thomas: Born to Mix was my crash course in the Absolut brand and I learned a lot along the way, more generally too. Especially how challenging it is to create something fresh when speaking on the issue of inclusivity in 2025.

While I was supporting Victor on the project, I was also simultaneously working on the evolution of the Absolut brand positioning. Working with Victor on Born to Mix was so helpful for me to do my job on an overall brand level. 

Victor: This was my Everest. On paper it’s one campaign, but in reality, it was dozens of projects rolled into one. A full suite of How to Mix films, product shots for every single SKU, hero drinks captured with craft, and a lifestyle campaign worthy of a global brand. Any one of these would normally be a standalone effort.

My personal goal was to bring together everything I’ve learned over the years about creativity, scale, brand integrity, and the realities of working in a complex global organization, and shape a campaign that could hold it all. One that was creatively rich, strategically clear, and operationally sound.

I kept thinking about all the people who would pick this up after launch. In markets, in agencies, in future updates. Would it help them? Would it still feel strong months or years from now? That mattered to me and the team. And somehow, with all its moving parts and challenges, we made it work. It holds together. It tells the story. And it’s something I’m truly proud of, not just for what it looks like, but for how much heart, care, and collaboration went into every piece of it from everyone involved.