Ararat Turns Brandy Glasses Into Emotion Displays in Belarus
Ararat's 'From Heart to Heart' is a November 2017 digital campaign created in Belarus by agency NEF/TBWA for the Pernod Ricard-owned Armenian brandy brand, pairing a free iOS and Android application with specially designed brandy glasses to recognise a speaker's emotions and project 3D holographic visualisations inside the glass in real time.
The campaign launched on November 9, 2017, at Falcon-Club in Minsk during a premiere screening of Murder on the Orient Express, according to electroname.com. Consumer availability of the ARARAT Heart to Heart glasses followed the very next day, November 10, 2017, through Vino-Vino stores, Armenian-brandy specialist outlets, and the dedicated ARARAT boutique, as reported by electroname.com. The simultaneous release of the physical product and the digital application was deliberate: the glasses were not decorative objects but functional screens, meaningless without the software layer built to animate them.
In Belarus, the campaign operated as a localised expression of a broader international platform first introduced in 2016, according to En Araratbrandy. That platform had been distributed across Armenia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic by TBWA as early as October 2016, per electroname.com, making the November 2017 Minsk activation an evolution rather than an origin point — one that deepened the concept with proprietary AI technology and a physical product co-developed with Belarusian glassworks Neman. The campaign was produced with Clapboard Score: 69/100.
Ararat built the 'From Heart to Heart' campaign around a strategic insight: that significant personal moments — toasts, farewells, celebrations — are consistently accompanied by a small set of emotionally weighted words and phrases. Anush Ambartsumyan, Marketing Director at Pernod Ricard Minsk, stated the campaign was built around those very words and phrases that accompany significant moments in people's lives, as documented by electroname.com. The brand's ambition was to make Ararat brandy the vessel through which those moments could be externalised and shared visually, rather than simply spoken.
The strategic context in Belarus in 2017 was shaped by a global brandy category that was recovering from decline. Global brandy volume reached approximately 1.412 billion liters in 2017, up from 1.410 billion liters in 2016, after falling from 1.438 billion liters in 2015, according to researchandmarkets.com. Within that recovering landscape, Ararat faced competition from substantial international players. Emperador held the largest global brandy volume share with approximately 27.1 million cases in 2017, representing a decline of around 3.2% from the prior year, per researchandmarkets.com. Martell, distributed by Pernod Ricard's own portfolio, reported approximately 2.2 million cases in 2017 with growth of around 7%, driven largely by China and Asian travel retail, as reported by The Spirits Business.
For Ararat to stand apart in the Belarusian alcoholic drinks market, functional differentiation through bottle design or liquid quality alone was insufficient. The 'From Heart to Heart' strategy used technology not as a gimmick but as an extension of the brand's existing emotional positioning, creating a reason to choose Ararat glasses specifically for occasions that already mattered to consumers. The partnership with IT company Synpatic gave NEF/TBWA a credible technical foundation for that emotional promise.
The creative execution of 'From Heart to Heart' depended on the convergence of three distinct disciplines: advertising craft, software engineering, and glassware manufacturing. NEF/TBWA Belarus led the creative direction, Synpatic — also identified in some documentation as NeoSound — developed the AI emotion recognition module, and Neman glassworks produced the specially designed brandy glasses that served as the projection surface, as reported by electroname.com.
The iOS and Android application, available free through the App Store and Google Play according to electroname.com, used an emotion recognition module that analysed speech and identified the emotional register of the user's words in real time. Ivan Ponomariov, Creative Director at NEF/TBWA, stated that the application's emotion recognition module becomes more accurate with each conversation, as documented by electroname.com — a claim that positioned the technology as adaptive rather than static, and the glasses as objects that developed a kind of relational memory over repeated use.
The 3D holographic visualisations projected inside the glass responded to the recognised emotions, transforming the act of making a toast into a personalised visual moment. The physical design of the Neman-manufactured brandy glasses was engineered to work specifically with the application's augmented reality layer, meaning the creative and the product were inseparable. Production credits documented by electroname.com include Creative Directors Oleg Romanov and Ivan Ponomariov, Cyber Art Director Artem Sawitski, Art Director Sergey Kovalenko, Copywriter Hanna Launikovich, and Account Director Vitalia Mironenko at NEF/TBWA in Minsk, Belarus. The precision of those roles — particularly the separation of a dedicated cyber art director from a traditional art director — signals how technically demanding the execution actually was.
No verified performance data for the 'From Heart to Heart' campaign is publicly available in terms of application downloads, sales uplift, or reach metrics specific to the Belarusian market. What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign was designed with measurable consumer touchpoints built in: the free availability of the iOS and Android application through App Store and Google Play created a trackable acquisition funnel, and the retail distribution through Vino-Vino stores, Armenian-brandy outlets, and the ARARAT boutique from November 10, 2017, as reported by electroname.com, provided a defined geographic sales footprint.
The campaign's architecture suggests effectiveness reasoning even in the absence of published results. Launching at the premiere screening of Murder on the Orient Express at Falcon-Club in Minsk on November 9, 2017, placed the brand in front of an audience already primed for narrative and emotional engagement. The 24-hour gap between that event and retail availability of the glasses created a deliberate anticipation window. The adaptive AI module described by Ivan Ponomariov at electroname.com — one that improves with use — built a structural incentive for repeated engagement, which is unusually sophisticated for a single-market promotional product.
Ararat's lineage as a brand with documented creative ambition supports this reading. An earlier 2014 campaign, 'Legends of ArArAt', used historical photographs with humorous captions featuring figures including Churchill and Roosevelt to emphasise the brand's heritage in the Russian market, as documented by Arka Am. The 2017 Belarus activation moved that strategy from historical authority toward technological intimacy — a meaningful creative evolution. Clapboard Score: 69/100.
Ararat's 'From Heart to Heart' is a November 2017 digital campaign created in Belarus by NEF/TBWA for the Pernod Ricard-owned brandy brand. It paired a free iOS and Android application with specially designed brandy glasses, using an AI emotion recognition module to project 3D holographic visualisations inside the glass during conversations and toasts.
NEF/TBWA in Minsk, Belarus created the campaign. The creative team included Creative Directors Oleg Romanov and Ivan Ponomariov, Cyber Art Director Artem Sawitski, Art Director Sergey Kovalenko, Copywriter Hanna Launikovich, and Account Director Vitalia Mironenko, as documented by electroname.com.
The free iOS and Android application used an AI module developed by IT company Synpatic to analyse speech and identify the emotional register of the user's words in real time. It then projected corresponding 3D holographic visualisations inside specially manufactured Neman brandy glasses, with accuracy improving through repeated use according to electroname.com.
The campaign launched on November 9, 2017, at Falcon-Club in Minsk during a premiere screening of Murder on the Orient Express, as reported by electroname.com. The specially designed ARARAT brandy glasses became available to consumers the following day through Vino-Vino stores, Armenian-brandy outlets, and the ARARAT boutique.
Ararat's 'From Heart to Heart' campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's structural originality and technical ambition — combining an AI emotion recognition module, augmented reality, and purpose-built brandy glasses — balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance metrics from the Belarusian market.
Three partners built the campaign's physical and digital infrastructure. IT company Synpatic, also referenced as NeoSound, developed the AI emotion recognition module. Belarusian glassworks Neman manufactured the specially designed brandy glasses engineered to work with the application's augmented reality layer. NEF/TBWA led creative direction, as reported by electroname.com.
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