Meet Cup of Joe Black? De’Longhi is using A-lister Brad Pitt to bring a cinematic, luxury feel to a new global campaign as it looks to build the espresso category and continue a push behind its coffee business in North America.
The spot follows the actor and new global brand ambassador on a morning motorcycle sojourn, picking up coffee beans at a roaster. He then drives home and is shown crafting a cappuccino using De’Longhi’s Dinamica Plus model, a fully automatic, bean-to-cup espresso machine.
It’s a slice-of-life the Trevio, Italy-based brand is dubbing a “perfetto moment,” positioning De’Longhi around how the coffee brewing method can be perfected at home, explains Maria Colon, VP of marketing for De’Longhi.
Pitt, Colon says, has a lot of synergies that align with De’Longhi’s core values: understated elegance, authenticity, sophistication and quality.
While a leader in at-home premium coffee and espresso machines, De’Longhi has also been adding to its automatic options in recent years – the Dinamica Plus model, released in May, is a one-touch machine that lets the consumer can brew over a dozen different coffee and espresso beverages. These models aim to cater to both increased interest in premium coffee beverages and the “daily coffee drinker” who may not always have time to craft a cappuccino manually – a trend that has been particularly apparent in North America – by showing how the daily routine could be made more sophisticated.
The premium coffee maker space is fairly crowded, with the likes of KitchenAid and others, but De’Longhi’s differentiator is serving a range and genres of products, with both fully automatic and premium pump machines that replicate a typical coffee shop, Colon says.
Timing wise, the campaign is meant to leverage events like International Coffee Day and Cappuccino Day, and getting stars to align around that, so to speak. And it is doing more mass outreach in Canada to match.
“We’ve traditionally not done broadcast in Canada,” according to Colon, who says the TV spot is to appeal to multiple day parts and to a broad audience, as it builds on recent efforts to build the espresso category in Canada. “We’ve done many different things, from DOOH to intercepting the consumer on a mobile footprint and bringing them into retail partners like The Bay or Canadian Tire.”
While this marks the brand’s first international campaign, it’s localized to reflect different taste preferences. Cappuccinos and lattes, for example, are huge in North America, compared to single shots, which are more popular in Europe. Montreal, Colon says, is a very important region for De’Longhi’s core business, and it’s adapting voiceovers and taglines for the French market.
According to the latest 2020 insights, thanks to the growing popularity of single-serve coffee, the percentage of adults who own a single-cup coffee system has more than doubled since 2013.
De’Longhi worked with M&C Saatchi Milan as the creative project leader, with Current Global, its PR AOR, and Wavemaker, its recently named AOR for media.
