ARCHIVEair up Tells the UK It's Not a Water Bottle in Its First TV Push
How air up Introduced Scent-Led Hydration to UK Television in 2024 air up launched 'It's Not a...
Pimento Embraces the Weird to Sell a Spicy Ginger Drink
Pimento's 'Totally Weird' is a 100-second 2D/3D animated film created by Paris agency Animals, released in France in June 2018, designed to dramatise the unexpected intensity of a non-alcoholic ginger, tonic and chili pepper drink through a sequence of surreal, escalating scenes.
Pimento occupies a singular position in the French beverage market. Founded in 2009 by Eric Dalsace, the brand built its identity around a product that replicates the burn and ritual of alcoholic drinks without any alcohol content. The combination of ginger, tonic and chili pepper gives Pimento a distinctive kick that sets it apart from conventional soft drinks and positions it as a serious challenger within the ginger drinks category. By 2017, that positioning had translated into tangible commercial traction, with the brand selling one million bottles that year alone.
In France, where the brand is rooted and where this campaign was published, Pimento describes itself as the only seriously spicy drink on the market capable of triggering what it calls an explosion of flavours. Whether consumed straight or deployed as a mixer, the product resists easy categorisation — and the agency Animals chose to make that resistance the creative centrepiece of the work. The resulting film, titled 'Totally Weird', does not explain the product or enumerate its ingredients. It dramatises the feeling of encountering something genuinely unfamiliar: vivid, fast-moving, and deliberately strange. The campaign comprises a single media asset — the animated film itself — which was produced by Redge.TV and submitted to the industry record within months of its French release.
Pimento entered the French market in 2009 as a non-alcoholic alternative engineered to satisfy drinkers who want complexity and sensation without alcohol content. That founding insight proved durable. By the time Animals created 'Totally Weird' in 2018, the global ginger beer market was estimated at approximately US$4.20 billion, according to research cited by giiresearch.com and credenceresearch.com, with the non-alcoholic segment representing roughly 45% of that total. Within a market growing at a compound annual rate of 3.9% between 2018 and 2024, per zionmarketresearch.com, Pimento's French positioning faced increasing pressure from internationally distributed competitors.
Fever-Tree, the premium mixer brand with a strong tonic and ginger beer range, and Bundaberg, the Australian brewer with significant European distribution, represent two of the most visible competitors in the ginger drinks segment where Pimento operates. Both brands compete on naturalness and flavour complexity — territory Pimento also claims through its combination of ginger, tonic and chili pepper. The strategic decision to commission surreal animation rather than a product-forward food and drink advertisement reflects a deliberate effort to carve out differentiated mental availability. Where competitors use lifestyle imagery and provenance storytelling, Pimento and Animals chose to let the strangeness of the product experience speak through equally strange imagery. In France, where advertising literacy is high and consumer appetite for irreverent creative work is well established, that gamble carried reasonable logic. The campaign's single-asset structure — one 100-second film — concentrated the brand's investment in depth of impression rather than breadth of reach.
Creative director and copywriter Manoelle van der Vaeren led the creative development of 'Totally Weird' at Animals, Paris. The film runs for exactly 100 seconds and combines 2D and 3D animation techniques to produce a visual register that feels simultaneously handcrafted and digitally precise — an aesthetic choice that mirrors Pimento's own hybrid identity as a drink that is neither fully soft nor fully alcoholic.
Art director Pierre Cauret and illustrator Régis Saillard shaped the film's distinctive visual language. Their approach builds a series of self-contained scenes, each one interrupting the last before any logic can settle. The effect is cumulative: the viewer experiences the same disorientation that Pimento's ginger, tonic and chili pepper combination is said to deliver on the palate. Nothing in the film overstays its welcome, and nothing arrives predictably. The animation is vibrant without being garish, light in tone without sacrificing the sense that something genuinely unusual is happening. Producer Florence Larroque oversaw production at Redge.TV, the production company responsible for bringing van der Vaeren and Cauret's concept to screen. Sound design was handled by SMOOZE, whose contribution to the film's pacing and atmosphere is material — the audio register amplifies the visual strangeness rather than explaining it. The campaign was catalogued by culturepub.fr, which maintains a record of notable French advertising work, and has been documented across adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com as an example of food and drink animation that commits fully to its own creative logic. The film's 2D/3D hybrid format was not merely a stylistic preference; it was a structural argument about what kind of drink Pimento is.
No verified performance data for the 'Totally Weird' campaign is publicly available. No independent figures for view counts, earned media reach, or sales uplift attributable to the June 2018 French release have been disclosed by Pimento, Animals, or any third-party measurement body. The analysis here is therefore structural rather than metric-based.
The campaign earns a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. That score reflects a piece of work that succeeds on creative coherence — the animation, the sound design by SMOOZE, and the surreal scene structure all serve a unified strategic idea — while stopping short of the kind of cultural penetration or documented commercial impact that would push the score higher. The 100-second runtime is generous for a single-asset campaign targeting French audiences in the food and drink category, and it demands sustained viewer engagement that a shorter film would not. The 2D/3D hybrid technique, executed by illustrator Régis Saillard and produced by Redge.TV, gives the film a visual specificity that generic stock-motion animation would not achieve. The core structural strength of 'Totally Weird' is its alignment between product truth and creative expression. Pimento sells a drink that is genuinely difficult to categorise — ginger, tonic and chili pepper in a non-alcoholic format — and the film refuses to categorise it. In France, where the brand was competing against internationally recognised ginger drink brands with larger distribution networks, that distinctiveness had practical strategic value even if its precise commercial effect remains unquantified.
'Totally Weird' is a 100-second animated film created by Paris agency Animals for Pimento and released in France in June 2018. The film uses surreal 2D/3D animation to dramatise the unusual combination of ginger, tonic and chili pepper that defines Pimento's non-alcoholic drink. It comprises the campaign's single media asset.
Paris agency Animals created 'Totally Weird' for Pimento. Creative direction and copywriting were by Manoelle van der Vaeren, with art direction by Pierre Cauret, illustration by Régis Saillard, production by Florence Larroque at Redge.TV, and sound design by SMOOZE. The campaign was published in France in June 2018.
Pimento is a non-alcoholic drink. It combines ginger, tonic and chili pepper to reproduce the burn and complexity associated with alcoholic drinks. Founded in France in 2009 by Eric Dalsace, Pimento positions itself as the only seriously spicy drink of its kind in the French market, consumed alone or as a mixer.
Pimento chose animation to match the product's inherently strange sensory experience. The 2D/3D hybrid format, directed through Animals in Paris, allowed each scene to be as unexpected as the ginger, tonic and chili pepper flavour itself. In France's advertising-literate market, surreal animation offered differentiation from competitors using conventional lifestyle formats.
Pimento sold one million bottles in 2017, the year before the 'Totally Weird' campaign was published in France in June 2018. That figure demonstrates the brand had established meaningful commercial traction in the French ginger drinks market before commissioning the animated film from Paris agency Animals.
Pimento's 'Totally Weird' campaign received a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative coherence between the surreal 2D/3D animation and Pimento's unusual ginger, tonic and chili pepper product, while noting the absence of publicly verified performance data to confirm wider commercial or cultural impact in France.
.webp)
Creative Collaboration Platform: The Backbone of Modern Creative WorkWhat is a creative collaboration platform?Clapboard defines a creative collaboration platform as the operational core for today’s distributed creative teams. This is not a collection of digital collaboration tools stitched together; Clapboard’s system
Understanding the Creative Production MarketplaceWhat is a Creative Production Marketplace?Clapboard defines a creative production marketplace as a structured ecosystem where brands, agencies, and production talent converge to execute video, advertising, and branded content at scale. Unlike the legacy agency or freelanREAD FULL ARTICLE
The Urgent Need for a Creative Production Operating SystemWhy Traditional Creative Production Models Break DownClapboard sees the creative production landscape shifting under pressure. Content velocity is no longer a buzzword—it’s a mandate. Modern advertising demands relentless output across dozens of channels, each wREAD FULL ARTICLE
