Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling Brings Australian Animals to the Boardroom
Cool Ridge's Lightly Sparkling campaign is a 2014 Australian television and integrated campaign created by BMF Melbourne, in which a fictional management team of native animals — led by a CEO Wombat — debates and champions the brand's new lightly sparkling water range under the creative platform 'Crafted by nature.'
Schweppes Australia launched the campaign in August 2014, positioning it as a re-launch of the Cool Ridge brand in the Australian market, according to clapboard.com. The work extended beyond a single product moment: it supported new flavoured and lightly sparkling variants, signalling a deliberate push to move Cool Ridge beyond its established identity as a conventional still spring water, as documented by clapboard.com. The campaign was the second instalment in the broader 'Crafted by nature' platform, a creative thread that used Australian native animals as fictional 'marketing experts' operating out of Cool Ridge Headquarters, per clapboard.com.
The media mix was built for reach and frequency across Australia. Film served as the anchor medium, supported by television, outdoor, point-of-sale, and social media activity, according to clapboard.com. One media asset is formally documented for the Lightly Sparkling execution. The creative objective, as reported by clapboard.com, was to introduce Australian consumers to the lightly sparkling range using humorous execution — a deliberate departure from the category's prevailing tone of aspirational wellness and alpine imagery. In a drinks industry segment where non alcoholic drinks advertising in Australia had long favoured serene natural scenery and earnest health messaging, Cool Ridge and BMF Melbourne chose comedy and character as their distinguishing instruments.
BMF Melbourne identified a clear strategic gap in how water brands were communicating with Australian consumers. The stated objective of the 2014 Cool Ridge campaign was to break established category conventions for advertising water in Australia, as documented by clapboard.com. Rather than positioning Cool Ridge within the familiar visual grammar of glacial springs and active lifestyles — the territory occupied by competitors such as Mount Franklin and VOSS — BMF Melbourne constructed a comedic brand world anchored in distinctly Australian character.
The 'Crafted by nature' platform provided the strategic through-line. By casting native Australian animals as a corporate management team, the campaign turned the product's natural origin story into a running creative conceit rather than a static claim. The Lightly Sparkling instalment deepened this world, using the echidna as creative inspiration for the sparkling range's gentle effervescence, according to clapboard.com. This approach served a dual function: it communicated a product attribute — the light, natural quality of the carbonation — while reinforcing the broader brand personality established in the campaign's first instalment.
The strategic choice to deploy a Performance genre execution across television, outdoor, and social media reflected an understanding that character-driven comedy requires repetition and context to accumulate meaning. Point-of-sale placement ensured the animal characters could travel to the moment of purchase, closing the loop between brand awareness and conversion in Australian retail environments. Planner Simon McCrudden of BMF Melbourne shaped the strategic framework, according to campaignbrief.com, ensuring the humour served a coherent brand positioning rather than existing as an end in itself.
DogBoy directed the Lightly Sparkling film for Cool Ridge. The choice of director was integral to realising the campaign's comedic ambitions: the Performance genre demands precise comic timing, and the conceit of a boardroom populated by Australian animals required a director capable of balancing absurdist premise with grounded execution, according to campaignbrief.com.
The production was handled by The Pound, with Natalie Taylor serving as Producer, according to campaignbrief.com. Gary Woodyard edited the film, and Production Alley handled music, as documented by campaignbrief.com. On the agency side, the creative team comprised Art Director Robat Jones and Copywriter Kerem Sekerci, working under Creative Director Carlos Furnari at BMF Melbourne, per campaignbrief.com. Fiona Gillies served as Agency Producer, also per campaignbrief.com. The client relationship was managed by Bo Jakubenko, Brand Manager for Cool Ridge at Schweppes Australia, as reported by campaignbrief.com.
The creative premise placed a fictional Cool Ridge management team of Australian animals in a boardroom setting, with CEO Wombat presiding, as documented by clapboard.com. The earlier instalment of the 'Crafted by nature' platform had introduced recurring puppet characters working at Cool Ridge Headquarters, establishing the tone and world into which the Lightly Sparkling execution arrived, per clapboard.com. The Lightly Sparkling film continued this character-driven approach, using the echidna as both a narrative device and a visual metaphor for the product's defining characteristic. The integrated campaign extended this creative world across outdoor and point-of-sale, ensuring the animal characters functioned as a coherent brand asset rather than a single-execution novelty across the Australian market.
No verified performance data for the Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling campaign is publicly available. Clapboard assigns this campaign a score of 57 out of 100, reflecting a competent and strategically coherent execution that does not fully transcend its category context.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several markers of effectiveness. The 'Crafted by nature' platform provided a repeatable creative system — a rare asset in the food and drink category — and the Lightly Sparkling instalment used that system purposefully, tying the echidna character directly to a product attribute rather than deploying it as pure entertainment. This product-to-character logic is a meaningful creative discipline that many character-driven campaigns in the non alcoholic drinks space fail to achieve.
The media mix — television, outdoor, point-of-sale, and social media — was appropriate for an Australian brand re-launch seeking both mass awareness and retail conversion, as the channel selection ensured the campaign could work across the consumer journey in Australia. The decision to anchor the execution in a Performance genre film, directed by DogBoy, gave the campaign a strong focal asset from which all other channel activity could extend.
Where the campaign's structural ambition is most constrained is in scale: one documented media asset for the Lightly Sparkling execution limits the depth of the creative world that the 'Crafted by nature' platform was capable of sustaining. Additional commercials were planned for later in 2014, per clapboard.com, suggesting the brand understood this limitation and intended to address it through successive releases rather than a single campaign moment.
Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling is a 2014 Australian advertising campaign created by BMF Melbourne for Schweppes Australia. It forms the second instalment of the 'Crafted by nature' platform, using a fictional boardroom of native Australian animals — led by CEO Wombat — to introduce the brand's new lightly sparkling water range with humorous execution, according to clapboard.com.
DogBoy directed the Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling film. The production was completed by The Pound, with Natalie Taylor as Producer and Gary Woodyard as Editor. The creative team at BMF Melbourne comprised Art Director Robat Jones and Copywriter Kerem Sekerci, under Creative Director Carlos Furnari, as reported by campaignbrief.com.
BMF Melbourne created the Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling campaign in 2014. The agency worked directly with Schweppes Australia, the owner of the Cool Ridge brand. Brand Manager Bo Jakubenko represented the client, and Planner Simon McCrudden shaped the strategic framework at BMF Melbourne, according to campaignbrief.com.
The Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling campaign ran across television, outdoor, point-of-sale, and social media in Australia. Film served as the anchor medium, with one formal media asset documented for the execution. The integrated channel mix was designed to support the brand's re-launch across both awareness and retail conversion stages, per clapboard.com.
Clapboard assigns Cool Ridge Lightly Sparkling a score of 57 out of 100. The score reflects a strategically coherent campaign with a repeatable creative platform and a purposeful product-to-character link, offset by limited documented creative output and the constraints of a single media asset for the Lightly Sparkling execution.
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