Nestlé Joya Redefines Summer Desire With The Hottest Ice Cream Ever
"The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" is a 2014 film campaign created by Publicis Israel for Nestlé's Joya ice-cream-bar range, launching in Israel in May 2014, using seduction and celebrity to reframe a frozen product as an object of summer desire rather than a simple seasonal snack.
Nestlé deployed the campaign specifically to introduce a new range within its established Joya portfolio — known in Hebrew as שלגוני Joya — to Israeli consumers at the precise moment summer appetite peaks. The strategic timing of a May launch in Israel is deliberate: temperatures climb sharply in the region during late spring, and the ice cream category enters its highest-volume trading window. Rather than compete on flavour credentials or price, the campaign chose the language of heat, attraction, and aspiration to claim an emotional position in the market.
Publicis Israel produced a single film asset, anchoring the entire campaign in cinematic storytelling rather than product demonstration. The film medium was chosen for its capacity to carry mood, narrative, and desire simultaneously — qualities that a print execution or digital banner cannot replicate at scale. In Israel, where broadcast and digital video consumption were both growing rapidly in 2014, a well-crafted film could move across television and online channels without losing its core impact.
The campaign sits within Nestlé's broader global strategy of elevating ice cream beyond commodity. Joya is Nestlé's primary ice cream vehicle in the Israeli market, and "The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" represents one of the more provocative creative bets the brand has made within that geography. According to Clapboard, the campaign record was submitted approximately eleven years ago, confirming its place as a documented artifact of Israeli advertising from the mid-2010s. The Clapboard Score for this campaign stands at 63 out of 100.
Nestlé identified a durable consumer insight to anchor this campaign. Ice cream is not merely a food product in hot climates — it carries sensory and emotional associations with relief, pleasure, and reward that competitors in the Israeli market, including Unilever's Magnum and local players under the Strauss Group umbrella, also attempt to own. By pushing the temperature metaphor to its extreme — the hottest ice cream, not the coldest — Publicis Israel inverted the category convention and created a creative position that none of its direct competitors had staked at that moment.
The global packaged ice cream and frozen dessert market was estimated at approximately $57.26 billion in 2014, according to BusinessWire. A separate estimate from Mintel placed global sales at approximately $50 billion that same year, reflecting roughly nine percent growth since 2011. According to the International Ice Cream and Frozen Dessert Association, the global ice cream market increased by approximately three percent in value in 2014 while volume sales grew about four percent. These figures establish that the category was in a period of steady, if unspectacular, global expansion — meaning share gains in any individual market required genuine differentiation rather than category tailwind alone.
In Israel, Nestlé's Joya competes in a market shaped by intense summer seasonality and a consumer base with strong preferences for premium, indulgent formats. The strategic director on the campaign, Itay Boneh, and strategic planner Keren Machness shaped the brief around the tension between heat and cool — a paradox that gave the creative team a genuinely unexpected platform. Rather than cool the consumer down, the campaign proposed that the product makes the moment hotter, shifting the brand's emotional register from comfort to desire and from relief to anticipation.
Film director Ram Baruch helmed the production for "The Hottest Ice Cream Ever," working with production company Rabel — the same director-and-company pairing that had executed an earlier Joya film campaign as far back as August 2011, according to Clapboard. That continuity of creative partnership suggests a deliberate choice by Publicis Israel to retain a visual language that the brand had already begun to establish around the Joya range.
Creative director Amir Hasfari and art director Shiri Mann led the creative development at Publicis Israel. Shiri Mann's involvement also connects the 2014 work to the September 2011 print campaign for Joya, in which she served as a creative director alongside Rony Schneider, according to Adruby. This thread of continuity across both the film direction and the art direction gives "The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" a lineage rather than a standalone identity — it represents the maturation of a campaign platform that Publicis and Nestlé had been building over several years within the Israeli market.
The campaign cast Israeli actress and international model Moran Atias in a central role, according to Clapboard. The choice of Atias is strategically coherent: she carries immediate recognition among Israeli audiences while also representing a global standard of glamour that elevates the Joya brand beyond its domestic category context. Her presence transforms the film from a product advertisement into a short piece of aspirational cinema, in which the ice cream becomes a prop within a larger narrative of heat and attraction rather than the literal subject of a food commercial.
Account director Orly Reuveni and account team member Ortal Dudu Ravvin managed the client relationship, while production director Iris Yisraeli oversaw the physical production through Rabel. The result is a campaign whose craft ambition is evident in the specificity of its crew — professionals whose combined credits span multiple cycles of Joya's creative evolution in Israel.
"The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" generated more than 285,000 views across core digital channels, according to Clapboard. For a single-asset film campaign launched in Israel — a market with a population of approximately 8 million at the time — that figure represents meaningful organic reach for branded content in 2014, a period when the infrastructure for viral video distribution was still consolidating around YouTube and Facebook as primary platforms.
No additional third-party verified performance metrics for this campaign are publicly available beyond the digital view count reported by Clapboard. What the available data does confirm is that the film achieved distribution well beyond a standard broadcast placement, suggesting that the content carried sufficient creative pull to generate sharing behaviour rather than passive viewing alone.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on three decisions that remain sound by any creative measurement framework: a clear and counterintuitive central idea, a casting choice that extends the brand's aspirational positioning, and a film execution capable of living on digital platforms without losing its impact. The paradox of the hottest ice cream is memorable precisely because it is illogical — and illogical premises, when executed with conviction, generate the kind of attention that more literal food advertising cannot purchase. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that executes its central idea competently and achieves measurable reach, while stopping short of the cultural disruption that would push it into the top quartile of category work.
"The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" is a film campaign Publicis Israel created for Nestlé's Joya ice-cream-bar range, launched in Israel in May 2014. It uses a heat-and-desire paradox to position Joya as an aspirational product rather than a seasonal commodity, casting Moran Atias as a central figure in the film.
Ram Baruch directed the film, produced by Israeli production company Rabel. Baruch and Rabel had previously collaborated on an earlier Joya film campaign in 2011, according to Clapboard, making the 2014 work part of an ongoing creative partnership with Publicis Israel and the Nestlé Joya brand.
Creative director Amir Hasfari and art director Shiri Mann led creative development at Publicis Israel. Strategic direction came from Itay Boneh, with Keren Machness as strategic planner and Orly Reuveni as account director. Production director Iris Yisraeli oversaw physical production through Rabel, according to Clapboard and Adruby.
The campaign generated more than 285,000 views across core digital channels, according to Clapboard. For a single-asset film launched in Israel in 2014, that figure indicates reach beyond standard broadcast placement and suggests the content achieved genuine sharing behaviour among Israeli audiences during the summer season.
The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. This reflects competent execution of a counterintuitive central idea and measurable digital reach, while indicating the campaign did not achieve the level of cultural disruption that would place it among the top-performing food and drink advertising of 2014.
"The Hottest Ice Cream Ever" platform has roots in an August 2011 Joya film campaign directed by Ram Baruch and a September 2011 print campaign with Shiri Mann as creative director, both documented by Clapboard and Adruby. The 2014 work represents the platform's evolution for a new Joya ice-cream-bar range.
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