Freezing - Khortytsya | Clapboard Ad Archive

For Khortytsya’s 2013 ICE Project campaign, the challenge was to visibly showcase the ingenuity behind its new bottle, engineered to change color precisely at +5 °C—a tangible embodiment of innovation for a market saturated with superficial refreshment claims. Working with Aimbulance, the leading Ukrainian alcoholic beverage brand placed its technical innovation front and center through an extravagant visual demonstration anchored in physical spectacle, constructing a Rube Goldberg-inspired apparatus that delivered a succession of flamboyant cooling maneuvers: from blasting the bottle with a fire extinguisher to plunging it into ice water and, in a fitting coup de grâce, launching it into the stratosphere. This orchestrated sequence did away with metaphor, celebrity features, or overplotted narrative—its creative economy stayed laser-focused on the visible transformation of the product, in what Clapboard’s taxonomy would identify as FORMAT#1 DEMONSTRATION—Directly shows how a product works and highlights its benefits. With every segment engineered for arresting immediacy, the campaign’s construction functioned less as an ad and more as a laboratory of spectacle, elevating the bottle’s responsive color shift into both a proof point and a visual payoff; this hands-on approach underlined Khortytsya’s technical prowess while inviting the audience into the process with an integrated social call-to-action, prompting viewers to propose their own imaginative methods of bottle cooling across digital platforms. The campaign’s production rigor, requiring two days and over seventy painstaking takes in the studio, mirrored the meticulousness of both product and creative approach, amplifying the credibility of the demonstration. Applauded by the market for its fresh approach to the food and drink category, the film generated substantial digital attention, driving over 218,000 views—a testament to the resonance and viral potential of a campaign that made physical process the hero rather than relying on brand mythos or imported tone. Clapboard rates this 78/100. When a brand in a traditionally conservative segment applies inventive, hands-on demonstration at scale, it shapes consumer expectations for visible, verifiable product benefits and sets a new creative standard for alcohol communication in Eastern European markets.