Hercules ice-cream brand, with BBDO Ukraine, launched Everybody Lick in May 2019 — a single-film campaign built around unapologetic indulgence in the Ukrainian
Hercules Turns Ice-Cream Indulgence Into a Ukrainian Cultural Moment
Hercules launched Everybody Lick in Ukraine in May 2019, a single-film advertisement created by BBDO Ukraine, Kyiv, positioning the ice-cream brand around the uninhibited, sensory pleasure of eating ice cream in the open summer heat.
The campaign operates on a disarmingly simple premise. Ice cream is meant to be licked, and Hercules frames that act not as a moment of mild embarrassment but as a universal, joyful behaviour that cuts across age, setting, and occasion. In doing so, Everybody Lick attempts to move the Hercules brand away from purely functional food advertising — flavour cues, price messaging, product shots — and toward emotional territory anchored in collective experience. The campaign's geographic market is Ukraine, and its timing in May 2019 places it squarely at the threshold of the summer selling season when ice-cream category competition intensifies most sharply. According to clapboard.com, the campaign consists of a single media asset in the film medium, making it a focused, one-execution push rather than an integrated multi-channel effort. The choice of film as the sole medium signals a commitment to storytelling over reach-and-frequency mechanics. Hercules, a Ukrainian ice-cream and frozen-food brand associated with PJSC Hercules and businessman Igor Andreyev, according to vgoru.org, carries a trademark history in Ukraine dating to 1997, giving it more than two decades of domestic brand equity to draw upon. Everybody Lick represents BBDO Ukraine's effort to translate that heritage into contemporary emotional advertising, using humour and social observation rather than heritage nostalgia as its primary creative engine. The campaign was listed in the Ads of the World archive, according to adsoftheworld.com, confirming its placement in the international creative community's record of Ukrainian advertising work from this period.
Ice-cream advertising in Ukraine competes on a crowded seasonal calendar. The Hercules Everybody Lick campaign chooses behavioural truth as its strategic differentiator, grounding the brand in a moment — the public lick — that competitors tend to sanitise or ignore entirely. According to Bsagriculture Com Ua, the top five players in the Ukrainian dairy market by 2019 share included Danone at approximately thirteen percent, Milk Alliance at roughly eleven percent, and Lactalis at close to ten percent, illustrating the competitive density of the broader food and dairy sector in which Hercules operates. While those figures reflect the wider dairy category rather than ice cream specifically, they establish that Ukrainian food brands face entrenched multinational rivals with substantial distribution and marketing resources. Hercules, as a domestic Ukrainian brand, cannot outspend those competitors on media weight alone. The strategic answer embedded in Everybody Lick is to outmanoeuvre them on cultural resonance instead. By naming and celebrating an act that every Ukrainian ice-cream eater performs but that advertising rarely acknowledges, the campaign claims an authentic piece of consumer behaviour as brand territory. This is a classic underdog manoeuvre in food and drink marketing: identify the moment the category leader is too polished to own and plant your flag there. The insight driving Everybody Lick is that summer ice-cream consumption is inherently messy, public, and communal, and that honesty about that messiness generates more genuine affinity than aspirational imagery. For a domestic Ukrainian brand competing in May 2019, when the summer season was just beginning and shelf presence would be contested, this behavioural framing offered a way to earn attention without relying on production spectacle or media saturation.
Creative direction on Everybody Lick was led by Executive Creative Director Anže Jereb and Creative Director Denis Keleberdenko at BBDO Ukraine, Kyiv, according to clapboard.com. Art direction was handled by Rostyslav Vyshnevyi, with copywriting by Iliya Yankovskyi. The film was directed by Alexey Pasechnik of Esse Production House. Together, this team made a series of deliberate craft decisions that give the single-asset campaign its coherence. The film medium was chosen exclusively, which concentrates the entire creative argument into one moving-image execution. That constraint demands that the film work hard: it must establish the insight, deliver the comedic or emotional beat, and land the brand without the support of print, out-of-home, or digital extensions to carry peripheral messaging. Pasechnik's direction, operating under a campaign title as blunt and playful as Everybody Lick, would have needed to calibrate tone carefully. The risk in food advertising built around an exaggerated behavioural truth is that it tips from charming into crude, or from observational into condescending. The creative team's solution, as the campaign framing suggests, is to position the licking act as democratically universal — everybody does it — which distributes the joke broadly rather than directing it at a specific archetype. The campaign's copywriting, credited to Yankovskyi, carries the weight of that tonal judgment, since the title itself functions as both the strategic claim and the comic premise. Production credits for Everybody Lick are publicly documented, which is relatively uncommon for Ukrainian regional campaigns of this scale and reflects the campaign's submission and archiving through adsoftheworld.com.
No verified performance data for the Everybody Lick campaign is publicly available. According to clapboard.com, no published sales lift, revenue growth, market-share movement, brand-awareness tracking, consideration metrics, return on advertising spend, reach figures, or impressions data have been disclosed for this campaign. No verified awards recognition at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, The Webby Awards, or WARC Awards has been found. No trade press reviews in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, or The Drum have been identified for this work. In the absence of measurable outcomes, structural effectiveness becomes the relevant frame of analysis. Everybody Lick earns marks for strategic clarity: it identifies a specific, ownable consumer behaviour, names it without euphemism, and builds the entire creative platform around that naming. The film medium is appropriate for an emotional, behavioural insight that requires demonstration rather than declaration. The campaign's principal structural limitation is its single-asset scope. One film, in a market where domestic and multinational food competitors maintain ongoing media presence, places a heavy burden on that single execution to generate lasting recall. The Clapboard Score for Everybody Lick is 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that achieves creative coherence and strategic focus but whose impact is constrained by limited documented distribution and the absence of any verified effectiveness evidence.
Everybody Lick is a 2019 Ukrainian ice-cream advertisement created by BBDO Ukraine for Hercules. Published in May 2019 and delivered as a single film, it positions the act of publicly licking an ice cream as a universal, joyful summer behaviour shared by everyone, according to clapboard.com.
BBDO Ukraine, based in Kyiv, created Everybody Lick for Hercules. Executive Creative Director Anže Jereb and Creative Director Denis Keleberdenko led the work, with director Alexey Pasechnik of Esse Production House helming the film, according to clapboard.com.
Everybody Lick receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's creative clarity and strategic focus on a single behavioural insight, offset by its single-asset scope and the absence of any publicly verified performance or effectiveness data, according to clapboard.com.
No verified awards recognition for Everybody Lick has been found. According to clapboard.com, the campaign has no documented wins or shortlists at Cannes Lions, the Effie Awards, D&AD, Clio Awards, The One Show, The Webby Awards, or WARC Awards as of the available record.
Hercules is a Ukrainian ice-cream and frozen-food brand associated with PJSC Hercules and businessman Igor Andreyev, according to vgoru.org. The brand's trademark in Ukraine dates to 1997, giving it over two decades of domestic presence in a food and dairy market that also includes Danone and Lactalis.
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