NESCAFÉ Good Morning Brings Optimism Back to Italy's Coffee Ritual
NESCAFÉ's Good Morning campaign, created by Publicis Worldwide with its Paris and Milan offices in May 2020 for the Italian market, is a 15-second film that reframes the everyday greeting as an act of genuine optimism, anchoring the brand's long-standing association with the first cup of coffee as a moment of renewal and shared human connection.
NESCAFÉ launched the campaign with a clear editorial premise: the phrase 'good morning' had become reflexive, emptied of intent through repetition and social convention. The brand's response, developed in collaboration with Publicis Worldwide, was to restore the word 'good' to its full weight — positioning the morning coffee ritual not merely as habit but as a daily promise of beginning again. In a year defined by disruption across Italy and the wider world, that proposition carried particular cultural resonance. As documented by Ads of the World, the campaign was archived under May 2020 and represents a localized creative expression of NESCAFÉ's broader masterbrand platform. According to engage.it, Italian television and digital placement began on June 4, 2020, with distribution spanning television, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, including planned activity across Instagram Stories and Facebook posts. The campaign belongs to the Drinks (Non Alcoholic) category and comprises a single primary media asset in the film format. It sits within a broader strategic lineage traceable to the 2014 global 'It all starts with a NESCAFÉ' platform, which was itself introduced through Nestlé's REDvolution repositioning, as documented on Nescafe and thecasecentre.org. The Good Morning film is neither a radical departure nor a simple repetition — it is a precise, timed application of an established brand idea to a specific cultural moment in Italy.
COVID-19 fundamentally altered how Italians consumed coffee in 2020. The channel shift away from coffee shops and hospitality venues toward at-home consumption was sharp and rapid, according to data reported by drinkripples.com and corroborated by analysis from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. For a brand whose identity has long been bound to the domestic morning moment, this structural market change created both urgency and opportunity. NESCAFÉ, as one of the world's most recognised instant and soluble coffee brands, was positioned to meet Italian consumers precisely where they had been forced to retreat — the home kitchen, the kitchen table, the first quiet minutes of a changed day.
The strategic rationale behind the Good Morning campaign reflects a tension inherent in NESCAFÉ's competitive environment. Nestlé, NESCAFÉ's parent company, and Philip Morris International together controlled approximately 49% of the global roasted and instant-coffee market during this period, according to analysis cited by hivos.org and iisd.org — a position that demands brand-level differentiation rather than category-level education. In Italy, where espresso culture and domestic coffee preparation carry deep cultural significance, competitors including Lavazza and Illy occupy strong emotional and heritage territory. Against that backdrop, Publicis Worldwide's strategic choice was to anchor NESCAFÉ not to product attributes but to a universal human behaviour: the act of greeting the morning with intention. Daniel Groh, Senior Strategic Planner on the campaign, contributed to a brief that located the brand at the intersection of coffee ritual and emotional renewal — a positioning designed to transcend product comparisons and operate at the level of shared daily experience.
Bruno Bertelli, Global Chief Creative Officer at Publicis Worldwide, led the creative leadership structure for the Good Morning campaign, working alongside Global Creative Director Davide Boscacci and Executive Creative Director Hugo Gallardo, as documented by Ads of the World and bestadsontv.com. The creative team also included Jen Smith as ACD and Head of Copy, and Gustavo Lacerda as ACD and Art Director — a pairing that shaped the film's tonal balance between spoken simplicity and visual warmth. Production was handled by Prodigious Italy, with Sanam Bartoletti serving as producer and Francesca Zazzera as Head of Production, according to credits published on thecreativesroom.com and merca20.com.
The musical centrepiece of the 15-second film is 'First Day of My Life' by Bright Eyes, with music production and sound design by Yessian. The song selection is not incidental — its lyrical register of newness, arrival, and quiet joy maps directly onto the campaign's core claim that every morning holds the potential of a genuine beginning. In a format as compressed as 15 seconds, the choice of a pre-existing track with its own emotional associations does significant narrative work that original composition would struggle to match at comparable cost and speed. The Publicis Worldwide Paris and Milan offices brought two distinct creative cultures to the production: Paris contributing to overall strategic and creative direction, Milan contributing local market fluency essential to ensuring the film resonated with Italian audiences without reading as a generic export. The result is a piece of work that functions within the Drinks (Non Alcoholic) category while aspiring to the emotional register of human interest storytelling — a formal choice consistent with NESCAFÉ's global communications approach across markets.
NESCAFÉ's Good Morning campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. No independently verified paid-media performance data, brand-lift figures, or sales uplift metrics for the Good Morning campaign are publicly available. The figures accessible through the campaign's YouTube presence — 16,596 views and 33 likes, as recorded by clapboard.com — reflect modest organic engagement consistent with a 15-second television-first asset that was not designed primarily for YouTube amplification. The single comment on record does not provide evaluative signal.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on strategic timing rather than creative scale. Launching in Italy in May and June 2020 — at the precise moment when at-home coffee consumption had become the default rather than the exception, as reported by drinkripples.com — the Good Morning film addressed a real behavioural shift with a prepared brand idea. The campaign's lineage within the 2014 'It all starts with a NESCAFÉ' platform, documented on nescafe.com and thecasecentre.org, means it operated within an established strategic framework rather than requiring audiences to learn a new brand positioning. That continuity reduces creative risk and maximises the signal efficiency of a 15-second format. The decision to distribute across television, digital platforms, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook — including planned Instagram Stories and Facebook posts, per engage.it — reflects a multi-touchpoint model appropriate for reaching Italian consumers across both broadcast and social environments in 2020. The Clapboard Score of 63 reflects a campaign that is strategically coherent and culturally well-timed but limited in scale, creative ambition, and measurable public impact relative to benchmark campaigns in the Drinks (Non Alcoholic) category.
The NESCAFÉ Good Morning campaign is a 15-second film created by Publicis Worldwide for the Italian market in May 2020. It reframes the everyday greeting as a moment of genuine optimism, anchoring the brand to the morning coffee ritual. Italian television and digital placement began on June 4, 2020, per engage.it.
Publicis Worldwide created the Good Morning campaign, with its Paris and Milan offices jointly credited. Global Chief Creative Officer Bruno Bertelli led the creative team, which included Global Creative Director Davide Boscacci and Executive Creative Director Hugo Gallardo, as documented by Ads of the World and bestadsontv.com.
The NESCAFÉ Good Morning film uses 'First Day of My Life' by Bright Eyes. Music production and sound design were handled by Yessian. The song's lyrical register of newness and arrival directly supports the campaign's central idea that every morning represents a genuine new beginning, as credited on thecreativesroom.com.
The campaign was published in Italy in May 2020 and went on air on June 4, 2020, according to engage.it. Distribution spanned television, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, with planned activity across Instagram Stories and Facebook posts, making it a multi-platform campaign targeting Italian consumers across broadcast and social channels.
The NESCAFÉ Good Morning campaign receives a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strategic coherence and well-timed Italian market launch but acknowledges limited creative scale and modest publicly recorded engagement, with 16,596 YouTube views documented by clapboard.com.
Good Morning is a localized continuation of NESCAFÉ's 2014 global 'It all starts with a NESCAFÉ' platform, introduced through Nestlé's REDvolution repositioning, as documented on nescafe.com and thecasecentre.org. The 2020 Italian campaign applies that established masterbrand framework to a specific cultural moment shaped by significant at-home consumption shifts.
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