ARCHIVEOpinions welcome - Thanksgiving edition round 1, Opinions... - Laphroaig | Clapboard Ad Archive
Laphroaig’s Opinions Welcome Thanksgiving Edition Round 1, developed by White Label for the UK...
How Coors Light Built an Ice Bar With Jean-Claude Van Damme
Coors Light's Ice Bar campaign is a 60-second film produced by VCCP UK in 2014, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme building an ice bar with his bare hands in the Rocky Mountains, released in the United Kingdom on 27 August 2014 across social media, television, and cinema to reinforce the brand's cold refreshment positioning.
The campaign launched as a deliberate piece of social-first content. The 60-second film was seeded across social media channels before any television or cinema placements aired, a sequencing that reflected the growing primacy of online video in the United Kingdom's media landscape at the time. Television and cinema activity followed, extending reach to Coors Light's core target audience of 18-to-34-year-old consumers across the UK market, according to vccp.com. The campaign's strategic anchor was the brand's established cold refreshment platform, framed around the idea of an ice bar as the ultimate expression of Coors Light's product truth.
The Ice Bar campaign did not operate solely in the moving-image space. Experiential activity accompanied the film, with a physical ice bar opening in London for seven nights and additional activity in Manchester, bringing the Rocky Mountains cold narrative into direct consumer contact in the United Kingdom, as reported by campaignlive.co.uk. A competition offered consumers the chance to visit an ice bar in Austria, extending the campaign's geographic imagination beyond the UK while keeping its emotional core — cold, refreshment, spectacle — entirely consistent. Production was handled at Rattling Stick, with ZenithOptimedia serving as media agency and Guy Edwards and Aidan O'Callaghan leading media planning, per vccp.com. The campaign received editorial recognition from The Drum, which named it Ad of the Day, and was archived in the Campaign live trade database, confirming its standing as a notable piece of UK advertising work from 2014.
Coors Light occupies a specific and competitive position within the United Kingdom's premium lager market. The brand competes directly against established cold-positioning rivals, including Carling and Heineken, both of which invest heavily in emotional and lifestyle advertising across UK television and digital channels. Against that backdrop, VCCP's strategic logic for Ice Bar rested on differentiation through scale of spectacle rather than category convention.
The campaign extended a brand platform that VCCP had established for Coors Light as far back as June 2011, when the agency launched the Closest to Cold campaign in the United Kingdom. According to campaignlive.co.uk, that 2011 campaign represented approximately £6 million in advertising investment, described at the time as the largest in Coors Light's UK history, and it introduced Jean-Claude Van Damme as the brand's principal talent. The Ice Bar film in 2014 built directly on that equity, returning Van Damme to the Rocky Mountains setting and deepening the brand's association with extreme cold. By 2014, Van Damme had experienced a significant popular-culture resurgence following his viral Volvo Trucks split commercial, which made him simultaneously more recognisable and more self-aware as a performer, adding a layer of knowing entertainment value to the Coors Light work that spoke directly to the 18-to-34 demographic in the UK market.
The decision to seed the film socially before committing to paid television placements reflected a media strategy calibrated to earned amplification. In the United Kingdom, social video sharing had become a meaningful driver of brand awareness among younger lager drinkers by 2014, and ZenithOptimedia's sequenced media plan, with planners Guy Edwards and Aidan O'Callaghan leading execution per vccp.com, positioned the film to accumulate organic momentum before broadcast investment reinforced reach. The experiential ice bar openings in London and Manchester translated the film's narrative into physical retail and on-trade contexts, a connection Talking Retail noted in October 2014 when reporting on Coors Light's broader autumn activity in the UK on-trade channel.
Daniel Kleinman directed the Ice Bar film at Rattling Stick, bringing to the project a body of work that spans some of the most visually ambitious commercial productions made in the United Kingdom. Kleinman's direction gave the 60-second film its sense of physical credibility — the Rocky Mountains setting functions not as a stylised backdrop but as an active environment, one whose cold and scale the camera is made to feel rather than simply observe.
Jean-Claude Van Damme's performance as an ice bar builder carries the film's central conceit with a precise balance of sincerity and self-awareness. The casting of Van Damme was not incidental to the creative; according to campaignlive.co.uk, he had been the face of Coors Light's UK advertising since the 2011 Closest to Cold campaign, meaning his return in 2014 carried accumulated brand equity that a new face could not have replicated. The Ice Bar film required Van Damme to perform physical action in a convincing outdoor environment, and the production at Rattling Stick committed to a visual approach that rendered that physicality as genuinely spectacular rather than digitally comfortable.
Visual effects work on the campaign was handled by Framestore, the London-based post-production company whose credits span feature film and high-end commercial production. Framestore's contribution allowed the ice bar's construction to read as seamless within the Rocky Mountains environment, supporting the film's core proposition — that cold of this magnitude is real, not approximated. The campaign's creative team at VCCP UK included copywriter Jermaine Hillman and planners George Everett and Sandie Dilger, with Johnnie Frankel serving as executive producer and producer, per vccp.com. The Wake The Town production company is also associated with elements of the campaign's execution. The overall craft commitment across direction, performance, and post-production positioned Ice Bar as a premium piece of UK commercial filmmaking within the food and drink category.
No independently verified audience or sales performance data for the Coors Light Ice Bar campaign is publicly available beyond trade and editorial recognition. What the public record does confirm is substantive. The Drum awarded the campaign its Ad of the Day designation upon launch, as reported by The Drum, reflecting peer-level recognition within the UK advertising industry. The campaign was formally archived in the Campaign live trade database under the title Coors Light ice bar by VCCP, dated 21 August 2014, according to campaignlive.co.uk, cementing its status as a documented piece of significant UK commercial work.
The experiential dimension of the campaign generated further coverage. Talking Retail reported in October 2014 on Coors Light's autumn activity in the United Kingdom, situating the Ice Bar campaign within a broader commercial push that included on-trade activations. The London ice bar, which ran for seven nights according to vccp.com, and the Manchester activation together created physical touchpoints that extended earned media beyond the film itself. An Austrian ice bar competition added an international layer to what was primarily a UK market campaign.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrated coherence across every channel it occupied — social seeding, television, cinema, experiential, and competition — with a single visual and narrative idea sustained across all of them. That consistency is among the harder creative achievements in multi-channel campaign planning, and it is the primary reason the Ice Bar campaign retains analytical interest a decade after its UK launch. Clapboard rates the Coors Light Ice Bar campaign 69 out of 100, reflecting strong creative ambition and executional craft alongside limited publicly available performance verification.
The Coors Light Ice Bar campaign is a 60-second film produced by VCCP UK in 2014, featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme building an ice bar in the Rocky Mountains. It launched in the United Kingdom on 27 August 2014 across social media, television, and cinema, and was supported by physical ice bar activations in London and Manchester.
Daniel Kleinman directed the Ice Bar film at Rattling Stick. Kleinman brought high-end commercial film craft to the Rocky Mountains setting, with post-production visual effects handled by Framestore. The campaign's creative team at VCCP UK included copywriter Jermaine Hillman and planners George Everett and Sandie Dilger, per vccp.com.
Jean-Claude Van Damme had been the face of Coors Light's UK advertising since 2011, when VCCP launched the Closest to Cold platform. According to campaignlive.co.uk, that campaign represented approximately £6 million in investment. His return in 2014 carried three years of accumulated brand equity and coincided with a renewed popular-culture profile following his viral Volvo Trucks appearance.
VCCP UK created the Coors Light Ice Bar campaign in 2014. ZenithOptimedia served as media agency, with Guy Edwards and Aidan O'Callaghan leading media planning, per vccp.com. Johnnie Frankel served as executive producer and producer. The campaign ran across the United Kingdom on social media, television, and cinema channels.
Coors Light's Ice Bar campaign received a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative ambition, consistent multi-channel execution across social, television, cinema, and experiential formats in the United Kingdom, and high production craft, balanced against the absence of independently verified audience performance data in the public record.
A physical ice bar opened in London for seven nights following the film's launch, according to vccp.com, with additional experiential activity in Manchester. A consumer competition offered a trip to an ice bar in Austria. Together these activations extended the campaign's Rocky Mountains cold narrative into direct consumer experience across the United Kingdom.
.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
