ARCHIVELifestyle Guards - High Noon | Clapboard Ad Archive
High Noon’s Sun's Up campaign, created by Preacher in 2024, demonstrates a decisive shift in the...
Carlsberg Bets on Curiosity to Reframe What Beer Means
Carlsberg's 2024 campaign 'The Best Things Come To The Curious', created by London-based agency Fold7, is a global brand-building platform that positions curiosity as the unifying force behind life's greatest discoveries — from beer and music to invention and connection — launching first in Hong Kong on 1 April 2024 before rolling out across the United Kingdom on 1 May 2024.
The campaign unites consumers around a single organising idea: that the best things in life — great beers, memorable nights out, breakthrough inventions, and enduring music — all begin with a spark of curiosity. Rather than celebrating a product attribute, the platform elevates a human disposition, arguing that curiosity is not merely useful but foundational to progress and pleasure alike. In the United Kingdom, this represents a meaningful departure from the brand's long-standing 'Probably the best lager in the world' positioning, which held for decades on product-superiority grounds. According to fold7.com, the new platform was designed to run across Carlsberg's 120 markets throughout 2024 and into 2025.
The campaign's anchor film takes viewers on a cinematic journey through the ages, tracing the birth of music as a metaphor for what curiosity unlocks. It deploys across a broad media mix — television, cinema, online video and BVOD, social, digital, out-of-home, PR, CRM, e-commerce, retail, and internal communications — ensuring the curiosity platform permeates every consumer touchpoint, from the pub screen to the digital feed. As reported by decisionmarketing.co.uk, the campaign was formally announced on 2 April 2024, with the United Kingdom activation following in May. Clapboard rates this campaign 63 out of 100.
Carlsberg moved its global brand positioning away from product-superiority claims toward an emotion-led, values-driven platform in 2024. The strategic logic is grounded in a core consumer insight articulated by Lynsey Woods, Global Brand Director at Carlsberg, and reported by The Drum: 'This campaign is rooted in the insight that we can push the boundaries of progress with curiosity, something that is intrinsic to our core values at Carlsberg.' The shift reflects a broader industry recognition that lager drinkers in the United Kingdom and across Carlsberg's international markets increasingly respond to brand character over product specification.
The competitive context in the alcoholic drinks category is acute. Brands such as Heineken and Guinness — the latter enjoying a sustained cultural resurgence in the United Kingdom driven by both rugby association and viral social content — have demonstrated that emotional and cultural positioning outperforms feature-led advertising in building long-term brand equity in the beer, wine, and spirits landscape. Carlsberg's decision to build a platform around curiosity, rather than brewing credentials alone, positions it to compete on the terrain of values and identity rather than taste claims, where differentiation is harder to sustain.
According to Grand View Research, lager accounts for a substantial majority of global beer volume, confirming that the category Carlsberg competes in remains structurally significant. In the United Kingdom, where the alcoholic drinks market faces ongoing pressure from premiumisation trends and the growth of no- and low-alcohol alternatives, a brand-building platform that speaks to curiosity as a source of enjoyment and discovery offers a durable strategic frame that transcends any single product variant or seasonal promotion. Per fold7.com, the platform was explicitly designed for longevity across all 120 of Carlsberg's markets.
The creative execution centres on a single hero film that uses narrative as its primary instrument of persuasion. The film travels through time, tracing the origins of music as an allegory for the broader thesis that curiosity is the seed of everything extraordinary. By choosing music — a universal cultural experience with no linguistic or geographic barrier — Fold7 found a vehicle that could carry the campaign's meaning across all 120 of Carlsberg's markets, including its United Kingdom home audience, without requiring localisation of the central argument.
The production approach is cinematic in scale and tone, leaning into spectacle and historical tableaux in a manner consistent with Carlsberg's established advertising lineage. As noted by moreaboutadvertising.com, the campaign retains the brand's characteristic blend of humour, grandeur, and invention — qualities that have defined Carlsberg's film advertising for decades — while redirecting them toward a philosophical rather than a product-centred destination. The supporting tagline, 'Do the best things begin with curiosity? Probably', reported by decisionmarketing.co.uk, is a knowing callback to the brand's heritage slogan, threading continuity through transformation and rewarding long-term UK audiences who remember the original line.
Production credits for 'The Best Things Come To The Curious' are not fully publicly documented, however Fold7 is credited as the lead creative agency across all published sources, including fold7.com and clapboard.com. The campaign's narrative structure — positioning curiosity as both the origin of music and the spirit of Carlsberg itself — gives the brand a storytelling architecture that can accommodate future executions across the food and drink category without requiring a creative reset. In the United Kingdom, the film ran across television, cinema, and BVOD placements, formats that reward the long-form storytelling approach Fold7 employed.
Verified third-party performance data for 'The Best Things Come To The Curious' is limited in the public domain. What is documented is the campaign's scale of distribution: according to fold7.com and corroborated by decisionmarketing.co.uk, the platform was deployed across 120 markets in 2024 and 2025, using television, cinema, BVOD, out-of-home, social, digital, PR, CRM, e-commerce, retail, and internal communications simultaneously. That breadth of activation is itself a structural indicator of confidence in the platform's ability to travel.
On Clapboard's own platform, the campaign's anchor film recorded 12,982 views and 56 likes at the time of publication, with eight comments — modest engagement figures that reflect the specialised, industry-facing audience of an advertising archive rather than a mass consumer channel. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting competent and purposeful creative execution with a strong strategic foundation, tempered by the challenge inherent in translating an abstract philosophical proposition into immediate emotional resonance at scale.
Structurally, the campaign's greatest asset is its platform design. Curiosity is a theme broad enough to sustain multiple executions across the alcoholic drinks category — covering beer specifically and extending conceptually into the wider food and drink conversation — while remaining specific enough to give Carlsberg a defensible brand territory. Lynsey Woods, Global Brand Director at Carlsberg, stated in comments reported by thedrum.com that the brand has been using curiosity to push the boundaries of brewing for over 177 years, grounding the creative platform in authentic institutional history rather than manufactured positioning. That depth of rationale strengthens the campaign's long-term structural effectiveness in the United Kingdom and beyond.
'The Best Things Come To The Curious' is a global brand platform created by Fold7 for Carlsberg, launched in 2024. It positions curiosity as the unifying force behind life's greatest experiences. The campaign anchors around a hero film tracing the origins of music, running across 120 markets including the United Kingdom.
Carlsberg's curiosity campaign launched in the United Kingdom on 1 May 2024. The global rollout began earlier, with the first market activation in Hong Kong on 1 April 2024. The campaign was formally announced on 2 April 2024, according to decisionmarketing.co.uk, with UK media placements spanning television, cinema, and BVOD.
Fold7, a London-based creative agency, created 'The Best Things Come To The Curious' for Carlsberg. The campaign launched in 2024 as a global brand-building platform. According to fold7.com, it was designed to run across all 120 of Carlsberg's markets throughout 2024 and into 2025.
The 2024 curiosity platform replaces Carlsberg's long-standing 'Probably the best lager in the world' product-superiority positioning. The supporting line 'Do the best things begin with curiosity? Probably', reported by decisionmarketing.co.uk, deliberately echoes the heritage slogan, maintaining continuity for United Kingdom audiences while shifting the brand toward values-led storytelling.
Carlsberg deployed the curiosity campaign across television, cinema, BVOD, online video, social, digital, out-of-home, PR, CRM, e-commerce, retail, and internal communications. According to fold7.com, this full-spectrum activation was executed across 120 markets, with the United Kingdom receiving the campaign in May 2024 as part of the global rollout.
Carlsberg's 'The Best Things Come To The Curious' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects competent creative execution and a strong strategic foundation built around curiosity, balanced against the inherent difficulty of converting an abstract philosophical proposition into immediate emotional impact at scale across global markets.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
.jpg&w=256&q=75)
