Branded products are a fact of life, so naturally they will come up in plots now and then. At least, this is the theory behind product placement in film and television.

Advertising is also a fact of life, so you can’t really blame HBO’s Sex and the City team for coming up with a plot that focused on the making of a fake ad for Absolut Vodka. The Swedish company is betting that viewers won’t find anything unusual about the plot, which they were all too happy to help out with.

The episode, which Bravo aired in Canada in late October, shows Samantha Jones (Canadian Kim Cattrall) make a deal for her latest lover to appear in a fake Absolut ad called ‘Absolut Hunk.’

Samantha’s goal is to get some attention for the budding young model. She succeeds by depicting him posing in the buff, save for a strategically placed Absolut bottle, in a shocking ad that eventually winds up on a billboard in Time Square. The ad launches her boyfriend’s career and also sets off a craze for a new drink called Absolut Hunk (four parts Absolut Vanilla, one part sugar syrup, one part fresh lime juice and a splash of pineapple), which the girls drink on the show.

HBO approached Absolut with its idea in the spring and got an enthusiastic response. ‘We have the same target market and are both creative and contemporary brands,’ says Michael Persson, director of marketing communications for The Absolut Company in Sweden. ‘It was a perfect match.’

After reading the script, Absolut agreed to lend its creative team at TBWANew York to create a fake ad that would work both for the show and for Absolut. A few short months later, the episode went to air, first in the U.S.

The move marks the first time Absolut has used broadcast as a marketing medium. ‘This is nothing Absolut has ever done before,’ Persson says. ‘Absolut is a creative brand and therefore we want to act by ourselves. But when a possibility like this one appeared we could not stop ourselves from participating.’

Previous episodes of Sex and the City have shown Absolut products, largely due to the inordinate amount of time its stars spend swilling drinks in swank Manhattan lounges. One of their favourite drinks – the cosmopolitan – explicitly features Absolut Citron. Holly Wyatt, national marketing manager for Maxxium, which distributes Absolut in Canada, has noted a revival in Citron sales in New York, and Manhattan specifically, since the program aired.

Consumer and media response to the U.S. airing have already been positive. In Canada, Flare’s October issue features the product and a recipe for the Absolut Hunk martini, as well as mentioning that it comes from Sex and the City in a four-page spread on entertaining.

To Absolut, it’s incredible publicity, and incredibly on target with its hip, urban brand message. The vodka-maker had only one reservation about the project.

‘Absolut Hunk is kind of sexy and that’s not normally the way we do our ads, so we want to make it very clear that this is not an ad, but something off the beaten track, and something we did from an innovation standpoint.’