Tepelene Water's 'The Awakening Sound of Life' by McCann Tirana blends Albanian iso-polyphony and ancient aqueduct imagery into a single integrated film.
ARCHIVETepelene Water Awakens Albanian Heritage in McCann Tirana's 2021 Campaign
Tepelene Water's 'The Awakening Sound of Life' is a 2021 integrated campaign created by McCann Tirana that positions the Albanian spring water brand through the lens of indigenous folk music, mountain landscape, and a roughly 250-year-old aqueduct in southern Albania.
The campaign launches from a precise geographic and historical anchor. In Albania, the Tepelene water source sits in the country's mountainous south, a region whose ancient aqueduct infrastructure gives the brand a tangible claim to heritage that extends well beyond typical purity messaging. Rather than defaulting to generic natural-beauty visuals common across the non-alcoholic drinks category, McCann Tirana built the campaign around a poetic manifesto filmed on location in the mountains of Tepelene, letting terrain and tradition do the persuasive work.
At the centre of the creative is Albanian iso-polyphony, a form of traditional folkloric music inscribed on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list. The specific song chosen, known in the region as 'Give Me a Drop of Water', carries an intrinsic thematic fit with the product that no invented jingle could replicate. The track was reimagined for the campaign with a modern production layer that fuses electronic textures with recorded nature sounds, creating what functions as both a cultural tribute and a contemporary audio brand identity. The integrated campaign ran in April 2021 across the Albanian market and is documented as a single media asset, as noted in Clapboard's archive. Creative direction was led by Flonia Vasia Gjollma of McCann Tirana, with production handled by Anima Pictures. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting competent cultural execution within the constraints of a regionally scaled production.
ARCHIVETepelene Water competes in a crowded Albanian bottled-water landscape. A 2014 academic sampling study conducted in Tirana, referenced by himara.net, identified at least 17 domestic and international bottled-water brands active in the Albanian market, including domestic competitors Lajthiza, Qafshtama, Glina, Selita, and Aqua Viva alongside international entrants such as Evian and Acqua Panna. Against that breadth of competition, a purely functional message around freshness or mineral content offers little differentiation.
McCann Tirana's strategic response was to reframe the brand's geographic specificity as a cultural asset rather than a logistical detail. In Albania, origin storytelling carries particular resonance because national identity is deeply tied to landscape and pre-modern history — qualities that mass-distributed international water brands cannot credibly claim. By anchoring Tepelene Water to a named, verifiable southern Albanian aqueduct approximately 250 years old, the campaign constructs a provenance narrative that domestic competitors like Lajthiza or Qafshtama would need their own distinct regional stories to match.
The strategic use of Albanian iso-polyphony sharpens this positioning. Because UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage designation is publicly documented and widely known within Albania, integrating that musical tradition into a commercial context signals cultural seriousness rather than superficial borrowing. The campaign treats the folk song 'Give Me a Drop of Water' as a pre-existing proof point rather than a manufactured association, allowing the brand to borrow cultural authority it did not need to invent. According to 6wresearch.com, Albania's bottled-water market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of approximately 3.6 percent between 2026 and 2031, suggesting a market in which brand equity built now carries forward value — and in which heritage-driven positioning has time to compound.
Anima Pictures produced the campaign film on location in the mountains of Tepelene in southern Albania. The production decision to shoot at the actual source rather than a studio approximation is itself a creative argument: every frame of mountain landscape functions as evidence for the brand's authenticity claim, and the visual grammar of the film reinforces the poetic manifesto that structures its narrative.
Creative Director Flonia Vasia Gjollma of McCann Tirana shaped the campaign's overarching concept, with Senior Art Director Nertila Pere contributing to the visual language. The account team — comprising Milva Avrami, Çeltina Lloshi, Elona Zebi, and Jonida Zguro — supported the integrated rollout across the Albanian market. The creative team's decision to lead with a manifesto structure rather than a product demonstration places the film closer to brand film territory than conventional beverage advertising, a tonal choice that suits a campaign built around cultural legitimacy.
The soundtrack design is the campaign's most technically considered element. The original folk song 'Give Me a Drop of Water', drawn from the Tepelene area's oral tradition and representative of Albanian iso-polyphony as recognised by UNESCO, was reconstructed with contemporary electronic production and woven with recorded nature sounds. This layering serves a dual function: it makes the track listenable to younger Albanian audiences accustomed to contemporary production values while preserving the melodic structure that carries cultural meaning for older listeners. The result is an audio identity that spans generational registers within a single piece of content. As documented by Clapboard and adsoftheworld.com, the campaign consists of one media asset — a discipline that concentrates rather than dilutes the creative investment and places high demands on the film to communicate the full brand narrative without supporting executions.
No independently audited performance data for 'The Awakening Sound of Life' — including sales uplift, brand-tracking shifts, or media reach figures — is publicly available, as confirmed by Clapboard's research. No entries, shortlists, or wins for the campaign are recorded across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC, according to Clapboard and adsoftheworld.com. The campaign's YouTube presence, as documented in Clapboard's archive, recorded 2,542 views and five likes at the time of submission, figures that reflect the scale typical of a regionally distributed brand film in the Albanian market rather than a globally amplified production.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 positions the campaign in the competent-but-unexceptional tier within the non-alcoholic drinks category globally. Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on the coherence of its single asset: the alignment between the UNESCO-listed musical choice, the on-location mountain cinematography, and the provenance narrative is tight enough that the film functions as a self-contained brand argument. For a regional Albanian water brand operating without the media budgets of international competitors, the concentration of meaning into one well-crafted integrated film is a pragmatic and defensible creative strategy. Whether that strategy translated into measurable commercial impact in Albania in 2021 remains unverifiable from publicly accessible sources.
'The Awakening Sound of Life' is a 2021 integrated campaign for Tepelene Water created by McCann Tirana. It positions the Albanian spring water brand through location filming in the Tepelene mountains, a poetic manifesto, and a contemporary reimagining of the folk song 'Give Me a Drop of Water', which belongs to Albania's UNESCO-listed iso-polyphony tradition.
McCann Tirana created the 2021 Tepelene Water campaign. Creative Director Flonia Vasia Gjollma and Senior Art Director Nertila Pere led the creative work, with production carried out by Anima Pictures. The account team included Milva Avrami, Çeltina Lloshi, Elona Zebi, and Jonida Zguro, all based in Albania.
Albanian iso-polyphony, inscribed on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list, forms the campaign's sonic foundation. McCann Tirana selected the regional folk song 'Give Me a Drop of Water' and reimagined it with electronic production and nature sounds, creating an audio identity that links Tepelene Water directly to Albania's documented cultural heritage.
Tepelene Water competes against domestic Albanian brands including Lajthiza, Qafshtama, Glina, Selita, and Aqua Viva, as well as international entrants. A 2014 academic sampling study referenced by himara.net identified at least 17 bottled-water brands active in Tirana alone, underscoring the competitive density Tepelene Water's heritage strategy was designed to address.
Clapboard assigned 'The Awakening Sound of Life' a score of 63 out of 100. This places the McCann Tirana campaign in the competent range within the global non-alcoholic drinks category. No awards entries or wins are recorded for the campaign across major international shows including Cannes Lions, D&AD, or Effies, according to Clapboard.
Anima Pictures filmed the campaign on location in the mountains of Tepelene in southern Albania. Shooting at the actual water source transforms the landscape into visual evidence for the brand's authenticity claim. The region also contains a roughly 250-year-old aqueduct that anchors Tepelene Water's heritage narrative in a specific, verifiable Albanian history.
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