How Kopparberg Made the Great Outdoors a Brand Statement
Outside Is Ours is a 60-second film campaign created by 18 Feet & Rising for Kopparberg, published in the United Kingdom in June 2018 as the centrepiece of a £6 million summer marketing push designed to deepen consumer engagement with the brand beyond product-level affinity, using cinematic outdoor imagery to claim ownership of the seasonal social occasion.
Kopparberg launched the campaign on 14 May 2018, according to reporting by The Drum, positioning it as the next stage of the brand's ongoing Un-established since 1882 strategy. The objective, as stated by Rob Salvesen, Kopparberg's senior marketing manager, was to convert consumers' existing product love into something broader and more durable — genuine brand love. That ambition gave the campaign its name and its directive tone: the outdoors is not a backdrop but a territory the brand is actively claiming across the United Kingdom.
The campaign arrived in the same cycle as the launch of Kopparberg Black, a new draught product targeting the UK summer festival circuit, as noted by The Grocer and Morning Advertiser. The £6 million investment, reported by The Drum, represented a significant seasonal commitment for a cider brand operating in a market defined by short windows of high-volume outdoor consumption. Outside Is Ours was built to do double duty — announce the brand's expanded ambitions while simultaneously providing commercial support to a new product entering competitive festival retail environments. Production was handled by Blinkink, with direction by Noah Harris, and post-production and VFX delivered by nineteentwenty.
Kopparberg entered the 2018 summer season with a defined strategic problem. According to The Drum, the brand's senior marketing manager Rob Salvesen identified a gap between how consumers felt about the product and how they felt about the brand itself — strong product affinity had not yet translated into the kind of emotional brand relationship that sustains long-term loyalty and commands premium positioning.
The United Kingdom is the world's largest cider market, accounting for approximately 30% of global cider consumption, according to data cited by linclund.com. In that context, standing still is a competitive risk. Brands including Strongbow, owned by Heineken, and Rekorderlig, Kopparberg's closest direct Scandinavian-origin rival, compete aggressively for the same summer occasion across the UK on-trade and at outdoor events. The fruit-flavoured cider segment, which Kopparberg helped pioneer in the United Kingdom, was identified as the fastest-growing product segment in the global cider category, according to millioninsights.com, meaning the competitive field was widening precisely as Kopparberg sought to consolidate its position.
The campaign's strategic lineage is traceable to the FIND platform created in 2010 by Saint@RKCR/Y&R, which was built on the insight that consumers discovered and championed Kopparberg organically rather than through conventional push advertising, as documented by The Drum. When the account moved to 18 Feet & Rising, the agency inherited and extended that cultural positioning — the so-called cider of Shoreditch identity — while shifting emphasis toward a more declarative, outward-facing brand voice. Outside Is Ours marked the point at which that declarative energy found its fullest expression, framing the outdoors not as a setting for drinking occasions but as a space the brand and its consumers collectively inhabit and define.
Noah Harris directed Outside Is Ours for production company Blinkink. The film was shot at the Cederberg nature reserve in South Africa, a location chosen to deliver the scale and visual drama that the campaign's territorial ambition demanded, as documented by marcommnews.com and thedrum.com. The decision to film in a sun-bleached, arid landscape was itself a strategic creative act.
Will Thacker, Executive Creative Director at 18 Feet & Rising, stated explicitly that the work was designed to avoid the familiar visual clichés associated with Swedish heritage — pine forests, red wooden houses, Nordic winter light — that had become shorthand for Scandinavian-origin drinks brands in UK advertising, as reported by The Drum. Instead, the creative team, comprising Toby Roberts and Louis Jopling under Thacker's direction, built a visual world around aerial sculptures suspended in open desert terrain: surreal, handcrafted forms that floated and moved against an expansive outdoor sky. Campaign magazine, writing retrospectively in 2020, described the work as featuring aerial sculptures floating in the desert, a formulation that captures how distinctive the imagery was within the alcoholic drinks advertising landscape of 2018.
Production credits for Outside Is Ours place the agency producer role with Russell Taylor and the assistant producer role with Lew O'Brien, with James Faupel serving as Director of Production and Sam Barcham as Designer, according to clapboard.com. The production company producer was Richard Fenton. Post-production and VFX were delivered by nineteentwenty, with Ludo Fealy serving as VFX Supervisor, as documented by marcommnews.com. The collaboration between Harris's direction, the practical sculpture work, and nineteentwenty's visual effects produced a 60-second film with a visual grammar distinct from anything else running in the UK alcoholic drinks category that summer.
No independently verified post-campaign performance metrics for Outside Is Ours are publicly available in terms of brand tracking uplift, campaign recall scores, or attributed sales data. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 69 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and clear strategic intent offset by limited documented evidence of measurable commercial outcomes in the public record.
What the public record does confirm is the scale of intent. The £6 million summer marketing investment, reported by The Drum at the time of the campaign's May 2018 launch, was a material commitment for a brand of Kopparberg's size and placed Outside Is Ours among the more significant seasonal pushes in UK alcoholic drinks advertising that year. The Drum's coverage on 14 May 2018 was broadly positive, with editorial focus on the campaign's strategic positioning rather than conventional creative review — a signal that the work was understood by the trade press as doing something structurally different within the category.
The campaign's retrospective inclusion in Campaign magazine's 2020 coverage, which cited its aerial desert imagery as a defining visual device, suggests the work achieved a degree of cultural memorability within the industry beyond its initial broadcast window. For a campaign explicitly designed to shift brand perception rather than drive immediate sales, trade press longevity of that kind represents a meaningful proxy for effectiveness, even in the absence of quantified brand equity data. The structural alignment between creative concept, media investment, and the brand's existing Un-established since 1882 platform gives Outside Is Ours the kind of systemic coherence that tends to produce durable brand impact in the United Kingdom market.
Outside Is Ours is a 60-second film campaign created by 18 Feet & Rising for Kopparberg, launched in the United Kingdom in May 2018. It formed the creative centrepiece of a £6 million summer marketing push aimed at converting product affinity into deeper brand love, using surreal aerial sculpture imagery filmed in South Africa's Cederberg nature reserve.
Noah Harris directed Outside Is Ours for production company Blinkink. Harris worked alongside a creative team at 18 Feet & Rising comprising Toby Roberts and Louis Jopling, with Will Thacker as Executive Creative Director. Post-production and VFX were delivered by nineteentwenty, with Ludo Fealy serving as VFX Supervisor on the project.
Will Thacker, Executive Creative Director at 18 Feet & Rising, stated the team deliberately avoided familiar Swedish visual clichés such as pine forests and red wooden houses, as reported by The Drum. The decision was strategic: to differentiate Kopparberg within a UK alcoholic drinks landscape where Scandinavian-origin brands risked visual and tonal homogeneity.
Kopparberg committed £6 million to its 2018 summer marketing campaign, according to The Drum. Outside Is Ours served as the campaign's flagship film, supported by activity around the launch of Kopparberg Black, a new draught product targeted at the UK summer festival market, as reported by The Grocer and Morning Advertiser.
Outside Is Ours advanced the Un-established since 1882 platform and built on the brand's FIND heritage, originally created in 2010 by Saint@RKCR/Y&R, according to The Drum. The 2018 campaign shifted that foundation toward a more declarative voice, asserting collective ownership of outdoor social occasions rather than simply reflecting consumer discovery of the brand.
The Kopparberg Outside Is Ours campaign holds a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong creative craft, clear strategic rationale, and distinctive visual execution, balanced against the absence of publicly verified performance data confirming measurable commercial or brand equity outcomes in the United Kingdom market following its 2018 launch.
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