Gruvi Caind of Lov is Sammontana's first campaign for its Gruvi ice-cream stick, created by AUGE Communication in Italy in June 2022 across TV, OOH, and
ARCHIVEGruvi Caind of Lov Puts Sammontana's Ice Cream Stick on Italian TV
Gruvi Caind of Lov is Sammontana's first advertising campaign for the Gruvi ice-cream stick, created by AUGE Communication and launched across Italy in June 2022, using a 40-second TV film set to Phil Collins' Groovy Kind of Love to celebrate the ungraceful, sensory-rich experience of eating the product.
Ice cream and gelato occupy a foundational place in Italian culture. In Italy, the category functions simultaneously as an everyday staple and an emotional ritual, which gave Sammontana a cultural platform broad enough to support a launch campaign built on humour and sensory indulgence rather than aspirational imagery. The Gruvi ice-cream stick, described by Sammontana as having a rough character and a soft heart, was designed to deliver a distinctly tactile, multisensory eating experience — one that the brand wanted to dramatise rather than merely describe.
The campaign's central creative device is the pun embedded in its title. Gruvi Caind of Lov renders the Phil Collins hit Groovy Kind of Love in Italian phonetic spelling, aligning the brand name Gruvi with the English word groovy and inviting audiences in Italy to recognise the wordplay immediately. The 40-second film, which aired on national Italian TV channels, ran alongside digital video, national outdoor advertising, addressable TV, cinema, RealDOOH placements, and influencer marketing activity, according to clapboard.com. The campaign was reported by gdonews.it on June 15, 2022, as aimed at a young, dynamic Italian audience, and shots.net published positive editorial coverage on June 16, 2022, characterising the film as a humorous and sunny celebration of ice-cream eating. Clapboard assigns Gruvi Caind of Lov a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting a competent and culturally grounded debut that executes its comic premise with consistency across formats.
Sammontana entered the Gruvi campaign with a clear strategic brief: establish the product's positioning as a multisensory indulgence that does not take itself seriously. This positioning required the brand to differentiate within a confectionery and snacks category where competitors often rely on either aspirational lifestyle imagery or family warmth. In the Italian ice-cream market, established players such as Algida, operating under the Unilever umbrella, and Magnum compete for precisely the premium stick-ice-cream consumer that Sammontana was targeting with Gruvi, making tonal differentiation a necessary strategic lever.
The strategic foundation drew directly from consumer behaviour on social media. Annalisa Ferri, Marketing Director at Sammontana, stated to foodaffairs.it: "We drew heavily on social media to better understand the relationship between the product and our consumers." That research informed a decision to centre the campaign on the authentic, sometimes clumsy act of eating rather than on polished consumption fantasy. The awkward and uncoordinated moments depicted in the film reflect real consumer behaviour observed through digital listening, giving the creative idea an ethnographic grounding that purely intuitive briefs rarely achieve.
The global ice-cream market was estimated at approximately 73.2 billion US dollars in 2022 by DataM Intelligence, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 5.1 percent through to 2031. Within Italy, the gelato and ice-cream segment carries particular cultural weight, as clapboard.com notes, because the product category is embedded in seasonal and social rituals in ways that few other confectionery formats can match. AUGE Communication translated this cultural authority into a strategic permission for Gruvi to be irreverent — the brand could afford to be playful precisely because the category in Italy is taken seriously enough that mockery reads as affection rather than disrespect.
Martin Werner directed Gruvi Caind of Lov, with production handled by Mercurio Cinematografica, according to clapboard.com and adsofbrands.net. The film was created by AUGE Communication for Sammontana and released in Italy in June 2022. Media planning and buying was managed by Wavemaker Italy, according to adsofbrands.net.
The craft decision that defines the film is the use of Phil Collins' Groovy Kind of Love as both soundtrack and conceptual spine. The song choice is not merely decorative. It allows the campaign title, Gruvi Caind of Lov, to function as a legible phonetic pun for Italian audiences while simultaneously importing the emotional warmth and nostalgic familiarity of a globally recognised pop track. Werner's direction channels the song's softness against a visual register of physical comedy — the ungraceful drips, clumsy bites, and uncoordinated gestures that accompany real ice-cream eating — creating a productive tension between the romantic and the ridiculous.
Annalisa Ferri, commenting to foodaffairs.it, described the integrated role of packaging design within the creative system, noting that the team "embraced the creative idea to tell our story through the design of the packaging — an element that has been and keeps being fundamental in the construction of the product's trial." This suggests that the film's rough-exterior, soft-interior metaphor was not developed in isolation but as a translation of the product's physical form into narrative language. The Sammontana Gruvi packaging received a Gold award at the Dieline Awards 2022 and a Gold award at the Pentawards 2022, according to clapboard.com, confirming that the design language underpinning the campaign earned independent creative recognition. The 40-second format, deployed across linear TV, addressable TV, and cinema in Italy, gave Werner sufficient runtime to establish character, introduce the product, and resolve the comic premise without compression.
ARCHIVEThe Gruvi Caind of Lov campaign received a Bronze award in the Film Craft — Direction category at the ADCI Awards 2022, according to clapboard.com. The ADCI, Italy's principal advertising creative awards body, also shortlisted the campaign in Film Craft — Sound and Music and in the TV and Cinema category, though no wins in those categories have been confirmed, per clapboard.com.
No verified performance data for the Gruvi Caind of Lov campaign — including sales uplift, brand awareness movement, or media reach figures — is publicly available. What the award record does confirm is that the Italian advertising industry recognised the film's directorial execution as sufficiently distinct to merit bronze-level acknowledgement in a craft-specific category, which is a meaningful signal for a debut campaign introducing a new product to the Italian confectionery and snacks market.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several markers of effectiveness. The media mix — spanning linear TV, addressable TV, digital video, national OOH, RealDOOH, cinema, and influencer marketing, as documented by clapboard.com — reflects a layered approach designed to achieve both broad reach among Italian consumers and targeted efficiency with a younger demographic. The tonal consistency between the film's humour and the product's physical identity, rough exterior with a soft heart, creates a brand proposition that is communicable across formats without dilution. The ADCI recognition for direction, combined with the packaging's Dieline Awards and Pentawards Gold wins in 2022, indicates that the Gruvi brand was built with creative coherence across every consumer touchpoint available in Italy at launch.
Gruvi Caind of Lov is Sammontana's first advertising campaign for its Gruvi ice-cream stick, launched in Italy in June 2022. Created by AUGE Communication and directed by Martin Werner, the campaign uses a 40-second TV film set to Phil Collins' Groovy Kind of Love to celebrate the awkward, sensory-rich experience of eating the product.
AUGE Communication created the Gruvi Caind of Lov campaign for Sammontana in Italy. Martin Werner directed the film, with production by Mercurio Cinematografica and media handled by Wavemaker Italy, according to clapboard.com and adsofbrands.net. The campaign launched in June 2022 across TV, digital, OOH, cinema, and influencer channels.
The campaign won a Bronze at the ADCI Awards 2022 in the Film Craft — Direction category, according to clapboard.com. It was also shortlisted in Film Craft — Sound and Music and in the TV and Cinema category at the same awards, though no additional wins in those categories have been confirmed.
The Phil Collins track serves as both soundtrack and conceptual anchor for the campaign. Its title, phonetically rendered in Italian as Caind of Lov, creates a direct pun on the Gruvi brand name and the English word groovy, allowing the creative idea to work simultaneously as wordplay and as an emotional, nostalgic frame for Italian audiences.
Sammontana deployed the Gruvi Caind of Lov campaign across linear TV, addressable TV, digital video, national outdoor advertising, RealDOOH, cinema, and influencer marketing in Italy, according to clapboard.com. Wavemaker Italy managed media planning and buying, and gdonews.it reported the launch on June 15, 2022, as targeting a young, dynamic Italian audience.
Clapboard assigns Gruvi Caind of Lov a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects a culturally grounded debut campaign that executes its comic premise consistently across formats, supported by ADCI Awards recognition for direction and a coherent brand identity reinforced by Gold-winning packaging design at the Dieline Awards and Pentawards 2022.
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