How Black Sea Gold Pomorie Used Rakia to Unite Two Rival Bulgarian Cities
Varna 63 is a 2019 digital campaign by Black Sea Gold Pomorie, a Burgas-based alcoholic drinks brand, in which the company temporarily renamed its flagship rakia Burgas 63 to Varna 63 on August 15 — National Varna Day — to symbolically bridge the long-standing rivalry between Bulgaria's two largest coastal cities, according to Apps Fas Usda Gov.
Bulgaria's two dominant coastal cities, Burgas and Varna, share a rivalry that runs deep into the country's cultural identity. Each city stakes a claim to being the superior Bulgarian coastal city, and that tension rarely finds resolution. Human Agency, a Wearehuman Bg.clapboard.com/archive/vinge-the-seat-professional-services">Sofia-based creative agency, identified this friction not as a problem but as a platform. By persuading Black Sea Gold Pomorie to surrender its own brand name for a single day, the campaign transformed a commercial product into a cultural gesture, according to Cms Law. The renamed bottle became the argument: that traditional Bulgarian rakia, a spirit historically associated with hospitality and reconciliation, transcends local pride.
Launched in August 2019 across digital channels, the campaign carried the Bulgarian-language line translating to "From our city, for your city" — a formulation that acknowledged the brand's Burgas roots while extending an olive branch northward along the Black Sea coast, according to Oecd. The single media asset underpinning the campaign was compact by production standards, yet the creative logic was structurally ambitious: rename a beloved product after your rival's city and invite both sides to share it. The Clapboard Score for Varna 63 stands at 63 out of 100, a figure that reflects the campaign's conceptual clarity while noting the limited scale of its documented execution.
Rakia occupies a singular position in Bulgarian drinking culture. According to data reported by the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service, official rakia sales in Bulgaria reached 8.873 million liters in 2019, representing growth of approximately 5.9 percent compared to 2018. The same source notes that rakia accounted for more than 46 percent of total spirits consumption in Bulgaria, making it the country's leading distilled-spirit category by a considerable margin. For Black Sea Gold Pomorie, a brand whose Burgas 63 expression is directly named after its home city, this cultural dominance provided a ready-made symbolic vocabulary.
Human Agency's strategic insight was precise. The Burgas–Varna rivalry is not hostile in the way of football ultras; it is playful, persistent, and deeply felt by residents on both sides of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. That quality made it safe to provoke and productive to engage. Competitors operating in the Bulgarian rakia market — including Villa Yambol, which according to the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service held a substantial share of the documented domestic spirits segment — tend to lean on heritage and terroir as their primary creative registers. Black Sea Gold Pomorie, by contrast, chose geography as a social tool rather than a quality signal, repositioning Burgas 63 not as the best rakia from one Bulgarian coastal city but as the rakia capable of connecting both.
The choice of August 15, National Varna Day, as the campaign's single activation date sharpened the concept considerably. A permanent rename would have diluted the brand's Burgas identity. A one-day rename on the rival city's own civic holiday transformed the gesture into something closer to a public toast — timed, targeted, and impossible to misread in the Bulgarian market context.
The central creative device of Varna 63 is a product rename — an act that required no elaborate production infrastructure but considerable brand confidence. Black Sea Gold Pomorie agreed to temporarily erase its own city's name from its most recognisable product and replace it with that of its cultural rival. That decision is itself the creative execution, and it reflects a discipline that many campaigns of greater production scale fail to demonstrate.
Production credits for the Varna 63 campaign are not publicly documented beyond the agency attribution to Human Agency, Sofia, Bulgaria. However, the brand's prior creative history offers useful context. A 2017 television commercial for Black Sea Gold Pomorie, produced by B2Y Productions, featured creative director Rozaliya Dimitrova, director of photography Julian Atanassov, producer Aleksander Kenanov, and art director Kristian Lekov, with music and sound handled by Brambar, as documented by Bsgold Bg. That earlier work established a tone of warm, knowing humour around the Burgas 63 product — a tone the Varna 63 campaign extended into the digital space two years later.
The 2019 campaign's digital format consisted of a single media asset, lean by contemporary content standards. Its Bulgarian-language copy — translating broadly to "This summer we reconciled two cities" — carried the emotional weight that production volume might otherwise have provided. The phrase positions rakia not as a product attribute but as an agent of social repair, a framing consistent with how traditional Bulgarian rakia has been understood culturally for generations. In the context of the Bulgarian coastal city rivalry, the copy lands with the precision of an inside joke told to an audience already primed to receive it.
Documented performance data for the Varna 63 campaign is limited to its archive record. According to that record, the campaign's primary digital asset registered 1,432 views, 11 likes, and zero comments at the time of archiving. These figures represent a modest reach by platform standards and suggest the campaign did not achieve significant organic amplification beyond its initial audience. No verified sales data, brand-lift metrics, or paid media performance figures for Varna 63 are publicly available.
What the structural record does confirm is that the campaign's creative mechanism was sound. The temporary product rename was a low-cost, high-concept intervention timed to a specific Bulgarian civic occasion — National Varna Day on August 15 — and executed entirely through digital channels. Its effectiveness as a brand-building tool depends less on impression volume than on the quality of attention it generated among audiences already invested in the Burgas–Varna dynamic. In that sense, the campaign's architecture was designed for depth of resonance rather than breadth of reach.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 for Varna 63 reflects the campaign's genuine conceptual strength — the insight is real, the timing is precise, and the creative device is memorable — balanced against the limited evidence of documented impact and the single-asset execution that constrained its potential spread. For a regional Bulgarian alcoholic drinks brand deploying a digital-only campaign, the ambition embedded in the concept outpaces what the available metrics can confirm.
Varna 63 was a 2019 digital campaign by Black Sea Gold Pomorie in which the brand temporarily renamed its flagship rakia, Burgas 63, to Varna 63. The rename took place on August 15, National Varna Day, using the long-standing rivalry between Bulgaria's two largest coastal cities, Burgas and Varna, as its creative foundation.
Black Sea Gold Pomorie renamed Burgas 63 to Varna 63 to position traditional Bulgarian rakia as a symbol of reconciliation. The campaign, created by Human Agency, leveraged the cultural rivalry between the Bulgarian coastal cities of Burgas and Varna, framing the spirit as a bridge between two communities that rarely agree.
Varna 63 was published in Bulgaria in August 2019, timed specifically to August 15 — National Varna Day. It ran as a digital campaign across online channels and was archived in October 2019. Human Agency, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, was the agency responsible for creating the campaign for Black Sea Gold Pomorie.
Rakia is Bulgaria's leading distilled spirit, accounting for more than 46 percent of total spirits consumption in the country, according to the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service. Black Sea Gold Pomorie used rakia's cultural role as a spirit of hospitality and togetherness to frame Varna 63 as a gesture of civic goodwill between Burgas and Varna.
Varna 63 received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong conceptual premise — a precisely timed product rename designed to engage Bulgaria's Burgas–Varna rivalry — alongside the limited documented reach of its single digital asset and the absence of publicly verified performance metrics.
Varna 63 was created by Human Agency, a Sofia-based creative agency, for Black Sea Gold Pomorie. The campaign was submitted to the advertising archive by Human Agency's CEO. Specific creative credits beyond the agency attribution are not publicly documented for this particular campaign, though the brand's 2017 television work involved director Rozaliya Dimitrova and production company B2Y Productions.
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