Shooting indoors on a Tuesday

Low alcohol drinks all advertise the same afternoon: a beach, a low sun, four friends laughing at something off camera. Nine Elms sent us that brief too. What we shot instead was thirty pieces indoors, in kitchens, on weeknights.

The reasoning was simple. Nobody opens a low alcohol drink on a beach. They open it on a Tuesday, at the counter, while the pasta water boils, because they have work in the morning. That is the moment the product is actually for, and nobody in the category was showing it.

Practically it was also cheaper and faster. No location fees, no weather days, no permits. Half the pieces were shot in our own kitchen at the studio, which is a real one, and half in three creators’ homes. One practical lamp, the extractor hood light and whatever was on the hob. Nothing was lit to look like an advert.

The numbers after six weeks: completion rate 2.6 times their previous quarter, measured on the same platforms with the same spend. People watched to the end because the first second looked like their own evening rather than a commercial.

What we cannot claim is that it sold more. Completion is attention, not revenue, and Nine Elms changed their distribution in the same quarter, so we do not put a sales figure on this case study. Ruth, their marketing lead, put it better than we could: the brief was sunshine and what came back was a Tuesday.

The lesson we took is not that indoors beats outdoors. It is that the first question on any brief should be where the product actually gets used, and the second is whether anyone else is already filming there.