ARCHIVEHow Cointreau Made Aubrey Plaza the Face of the Cosmopolitan
Cointreau's Keep it Cosmo campaign is a 2023 United States holiday advertising effort starring Aubrey Plaza that positions Cointreau as the defining ingredient in the Cosmopolitan cocktail, distributed across digital platforms, connected TV, and social media including Hulu, YouTube, and Meta.
The campaign launched on October 3, 2023, in the United States, timed to capture consumer attention at the opening of the holiday season. Cointreau, part of the French Rémy Cointreau group, engaged creative content company Edisen as its end-to-end partner, entrusting the studio with strategy, consumer research, concept development, scripting, production, and post-production — an unusually consolidated creative mandate. The resulting work marks Aubrey Plaza's second major appearance for the brand in 2023, following the June Margarita campaign titled Make Your Margarita, MargaRight, which launched on June 14, 2023, according to reporting by The Drum and coverage on cointreau.com.
The campaign pairs Plaza with Toby Cecchini, identified by brand-innovators.com and LBBOnline as the inventor of the original Cosmopolitan. The creative premise is direct: Cointreau's orange character is not incidental to the Cosmopolitan but constitutive of it. By staging a dialogue between the cocktail's creator and one of contemporary pop culture's most recognisably sardonic personalities, the campaign asserts that authenticity — in both character and recipe — is the brand's differentiating claim across the United States alcoholic drinks market. Directed by Jason Woliner in Los Angeles, the work ran across Hulu, YouTube, and Meta, as documented by ispot.tv and mediapost.com, placing it squarely in the high-reach, digitally-led Food and Drink advertising environment that defined the 2023 holiday season.
Cointreau's central strategic insight is that the Cosmopolitan is not merely a cocktail but a sustained cultural object. The drink has been in continuous circulation for more than 35 years as of October 2023, according to brand-innovators.com, surviving trend cycles that have claimed far newer creations. That longevity creates a dual strategic opportunity: the brand can claim heritage while still operating within a cocktail category that skews aspirational and contemporary across the United States.
The global liqueurs market was valued at a growing multi-billion-dollar category in 2023, with orange liqueur specifically expanding its share, according to dataintelo.com. Within that competitive environment, Cointreau faces sustained pressure from rivals including Grand Marnier, which competes directly in the premium orange liqueur segment, and Patrón Citrónge, which targets a similar on-premise and at-home mixing occasion in the United States. Cointreau's response, consistent across both the June 2023 Margarita campaign and the October 2023 Cosmopolitan campaign, is to own the recipe rather than merely the brand — asserting that the correct version of a canonical cocktail requires Cointreau specifically, not a generic triple sec. As reported by The Spirits Business and LBBOnline, this ingredient-authority positioning is a deliberate long-term brand strategy rather than a single-campaign tactic.
The casting of Aubrey Plaza deepens that strategy. Plaza's public persona — dry, confident, resistant to obvious sincerity — maps directly onto a brand that wants to project sophisticated irreverence rather than conventional luxury aspiration. In the United States market, where Food and Drink advertising increasingly competes for cultural relevance rather than mere product awareness, that alignment between talent and brand character is a measurable creative asset. LaForce handled PR and digital amplification, Talent Republic managed casting, and MediaHub oversaw media placement, according to The Drum, creating a specialist partner infrastructure around Edisen's creative lead.
ARCHIVEDirector Jason Woliner brought a specific production philosophy to Keep it Cosmo. While the campaign was captured digitally, every other element was executed in-camera rather than in post-production, a deliberate choice that foregrounds the physical reality of both the cocktail and its performers, according to brand-innovators.com and shots.net. That approach carries aesthetic implications: in a visual landscape saturated with CGI-enhanced Food and Drink advertising, the commitment to practical craft reads as a statement of confidence.
Director of photography Carl Herse, identified in production credits documented by clapboard.com and brand-innovators.com, lit and framed the work to place Aubrey Plaza's physical performance at the centre of each shot rather than subordinating it to product glamour. Producers Chris Williams and the wider Edisen production team — as noted by clapboard.com — executed the Los Angeles shoot as a single integrated production, consistent with Edisen's end-to-end remit on the project.
Plaza's improvisational flair was not incidental to the production design but integral to it. LBBOnline, reporting on October 5, 2023, specifically praised her ad-libs as a quality that Woliner's directorial approach was structured to capture rather than contain. Toby Cecchini's presence adds a further register: as the documented inventor of the Cosmopolitan — whose original formula of vodka, fresh lime, cranberry, and Cointreau's orange character he developed over approximately 15 minutes of experimentation in autumn 1988, according to brand-innovators.com — he functions as living credential rather than celebrity endorser. The creative decision to cast Cecchini alongside Plaza creates a tension between historical authority and contemporary irreverence that the script and direction exploit for comic and persuasive effect. Shots magazine, reviewing the campaign on October 9, 2023, highlighted the in-camera approach and Plaza's performance as the production's most distinctive qualities.
No verified third-party performance data for the Keep it Cosmo campaign — including sales lift, brand-awareness movement, or paid-media efficiency metrics — is publicly available at the time of writing. Cointreau and Edisen have not published campaign outcome figures through ispot.tv, mediapost.com, or any other documented channel.
Keep it Cosmo receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. That score reflects the campaign's structural strengths — a clearly defined ingredient-authority positioning, a talent pairing with genuine conceptual coherence, and a production approach that prioritises performance over spectacle — set against the constraints of a holiday-season campaign that must operate within a well-worn cocktail category in the United States. The in-camera discipline and Toby Cecchini's casting as the Cosmopolitan's documented inventor give the work a factual backbone that most celebrity-fronted Food and Drink campaigns lack. Aubrey Plaza's second appearance for Cointreau within a single calendar year, following the June 2023 MargaRight campaign, also signals a relationship with genuine campaign continuity rather than opportunistic talent placement.
The primary structural limitation visible from the outside is reach compression: a comedic, talent-dependent creative that performs best when audiences are already familiar with Plaza's persona may under-deliver against consumers encountering the brand cold, particularly in a United States alcoholic drinks market where Cointreau competes against well-resourced rivals including Grand Marnier. Distribution across Hulu, YouTube, and Meta, as documented by ispot.tv, gives the work meaningful national reach across the United States, but the campaign's persuasive architecture is built for brand loyalists and lapsed buyers rather than unconverted prospects.
Keep it Cosmo is a 2023 Cointreau holiday campaign starring Aubrey Plaza. It launched on October 3, 2023, in the United States, positioning Cointreau as the essential ingredient in the Cosmopolitan cocktail. The campaign ran across Hulu, YouTube, and Meta, and was created and produced end-to-end by creative company Edisen.
Jason Woliner directed the Keep it Cosmo campaign. He shot it in Los Angeles using an in-camera production approach, capturing every element practically rather than in post-production. Director of photography Carl Herse supported the production, with the project produced entirely by Edisen as Cointreau's end-to-end creative and production partner.
Toby Cecchini invented the original Cosmopolitan in autumn 1988. He appears in Keep it Cosmo as a living credential for the cocktail's recipe, which he developed using Cointreau's orange character. His presence gives the campaign a factual authority that distinguishes it from conventional celebrity-fronted Food and Drink advertising in the United States.
Keep it Cosmo is Aubrey Plaza's second Cointreau campaign in 2023. Her first was Make Your Margarita, MargaRight, which launched June 14, 2023, marking the Margarita's 75th anniversary. Both campaigns were created by Edisen and positioned Cointreau as the defining ingredient in a canonical cocktail, according to reporting by The Drum and cointreau.com.
The Keep it Cosmo campaign ran on Hulu, YouTube, and Meta in the United States. Distribution also included connected TV and broader digital channels, as documented by ispot.tv and mediapost.com. The multi-platform strategy placed the campaign across both premium streaming environments and social media throughout the 2023 holiday season.
Keep it Cosmo received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative coherence — particularly the in-camera production discipline and the conceptually grounded casting of both Aubrey Plaza and Toby Cecchini — alongside structural limitations around reach among unconverted consumers in the competitive United States alcoholic drinks market.
.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
