NESCAFÉ This Is Our Grind Reframes Coffee for South African Youth
NESCAFÉ's "This Is Our Grind" is a 2019 South African film campaign created by Publicis Johannesburg that repositioned NESCAFÉ Classic as the coffee of choice for young people navigating the real demands of daily life, rejecting the idealised morning-moment imagery that had long defined the category.
Published in May 2019 across the South African market, the campaign centres on a single film asset built around one organising idea: that coffee is not a luxury ritual but a source of strength for a generation defined by ambition, pressure, and perseverance. The word "grind" carries deliberate double meaning — the physical act of preparing coffee and the relentless daily effort required of young South Africans facing economic and social realities. This Is Our Grind earns a Clapboard Score of 69/100, reflecting a campaign that executes a culturally grounded strategic pivot with craft and clarity, even in the absence of publicly documented performance metrics.
NESCAFÉ Classic, the product at the centre of this campaign, is positioned not as an aspirational accessory but as a practical, democratically available fuel. In South Africa, where youth unemployment and economic pressure remain defining conditions of young adult life, the campaign's refusal to deal in fantasy carries strategic weight. By naming the difficulty directly and aligning the brand with those who persist regardless, Publicis Johannesburg constructed a brand role that moves beyond refreshment into something closer to solidarity. The campaign was submitted to the industry record at Ads of the World and documented on Clapboard.com as a representative example of purposeful Food and Drink advertising from the African market.
NESCAFÉ identified a gap between how coffee advertising typically presents itself and how young South African consumers actually experience their days. Conventional coffee campaigns — including category rivals such as Jacobs and Ricoffy, the latter holding strong cultural equity in the South African market — tend to foreground warmth, ease, and comfort: a reassuring cup in a calm morning setting. NESCAFÉ's "This Is Our Grind" deliberately inverted this grammar.
The strategic insight, as documented by Ads of the World, is that South African youth do not see their mornings as serene. They see them as the opening movement of a demanding day. By adopting the language of the grind — a term with strong currency in youth culture across Africa and globally — Publicis Johannesburg gave NESCAFÉ Classic a voice that felt native to its audience rather than imported from a European brand playbook. As noted on thecreativesroom.com, the campaign drew on the cultural weight of hustle culture as it manifests specifically in South African urban youth experience, not as a generalised global trend.
This positioning also connects to a longer arc in NESCAFÉ's global strategy. As documented on thestrategystory.com, NESCAFÉ's "It All Starts with NESCAFÉ" platform, which ran from 2014 to 2016 primarily in the Indian market, similarly framed coffee as a cup of resolve for young people facing uncertainty. "This Is Our Grind" localises that emotional logic for South Africa, replacing the aspiration of upward mobility with the harder, more immediate reality of daily endurance. The shift from inspiration to solidarity is the campaign's most distinctive strategic move, and the one most likely to resonate with a youth audience that has learned to be sceptical of brands that offer easy optimism.
Creative Director Willie Struwig led the campaign, with Art Director Richard Thompson and Copywriter Jonathan Dennis responsible for the executional voice, as documented on Clapboard.com and Ads of the World. Production was handled by Sereti Films, a South African production company, grounding the work in local filmmaking expertise and ensuring that the visual world of the campaign reflected a South African vernacular rather than a generic pan-African or global aesthetic.
The film medium was the only vehicle deployed for this campaign, which concentrates its creative risk in a single asset. That choice demands that the film carry full strategic and emotional weight without the support of a broader cross-channel system. According to the record at Ads of the World, the creative approach rejects the soft-focus, golden-hour imagery that defines much of the global coffee category. In its place, the work presents the textures and pressures of everyday South African youth life — the early starts, the commutes, the effort that precedes any reward — with the coffee positioned not as the reward itself but as the thing that makes the effort possible.
Jonathan Dennis's copy adopts the register of a generation that speaks plainly about difficulty without romanticising it. The campaign's title functions as both declaration and identity statement: this is not someone else's grind, aspirationally borrowed; it is ours, owned and unambiguous. Richard Thompson's art direction, as represented in the single documented media asset, builds a visual language consistent with that directness — grounded in recognisable South African environments rather than constructed lifestyle sets. Sereti Films' production brings the technical execution in line with the creative intent, delivering a film that reads as observed rather than staged, which is essential to the campaign's credibility with a youth audience that is fluent in detecting inauthenticity.
No verified performance data for "This Is Our Grind" is publicly available. Neither Publicis Johannesburg nor NESCAFÉ has disclosed sales uplift, brand tracking results, or media performance figures connected to this campaign in any publicly accessible source, including Ads of the World, Clapboard.com, or LinkedIn industry reporting.
Structural analysis offers a reasonable proxy for effectiveness. The campaign's single-film format, deployed in the South African market in May 2019, concentrates creative impact rather than distributing it across formats. A single strong film with a clear cultural insight has a higher ceiling for earned attention than a fragmented multi-asset campaign with a diluted message — provided the film itself lands. The creative premise, as documented on Ads of the World, is strategically coherent: the insight is specific to South Africa, the tone is calibrated to youth audiences, and the product role is clearly defined. These are the conditions under which a film campaign generates genuine brand memory rather than passive exposure.
The campaign's positioning also has structural longevity. By anchoring NESCAFÉ Classic to the durable cultural reality of the grind rather than to a seasonal moment or transient trend, Publicis Johannesburg built a platform with potential for extension. Whether NESCAFÉ chose to extend it is not documented in publicly available sources. The Clapboard Score of 69/100 reflects a campaign that demonstrates strategic discipline and cultural specificity but whose full impact remains unverifiable without disclosed metrics. In the South African Food and Drink advertising landscape, that score places "This Is Our Grind" in the competent upper-middle tier — a campaign that earns its position without overreaching.
"This Is Our Grind" is a 2019 South African film campaign by Publicis Johannesburg that positioned NESCAFÉ Classic as fuel for young people managing demanding daily lives. It rejected idealised morning-ritual imagery and instead spoke directly to the pressures and perseverance that define South African youth experience, using "grind" as a dual metaphor for coffee and daily effort.
Publicis Johannesburg created "This Is Our Grind" for NESCAFÉ Classic. Creative Director Willie Struwig led the team, with Art Director Richard Thompson and Copywriter Jonathan Dennis, as documented on Clapboard.com and Ads of the World. Sereti Films handled production, bringing South African filmmaking expertise to the single-film campaign.
NESCAFÉ launched "This Is Our Grind" in South Africa in May 2019. The campaign was created by Publicis Johannesburg and documented on Ads of the World and Clapboard.com as a Film medium campaign within the Non Alcoholic Drinks category, consisting of one media asset.
"This Is Our Grind" localises a strategic approach NESCAFÉ had previously applied globally. As documented on thestrategystory.com, the brand's earlier "It All Starts with NESCAFÉ" platform framed coffee as resolve for young people facing uncertainty. The 2019 South African campaign sharpened that idea into a harder, more immediate statement of solidarity with youth endurance.
"This Is Our Grind" received a Clapboard Score of 69/100. This reflects a campaign with strong strategic grounding and cultural specificity for the South African market, executed through a single focused film. The score acknowledges the absence of publicly disclosed performance metrics, placing the work in the competent upper-middle tier of Food and Drink advertising.
Publicis Johannesburg identified that South African youth do not experience their mornings as calm or aspirational — a direct contradiction of conventional coffee advertising. As documented on Ads of the World, the campaign used this gap to reposition NESCAFÉ Classic as a brand that acknowledges difficulty and stands with those who push through it daily.
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