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V Energy Drink Brings Back the Bugs With Can You Feel It
V Energy Drink's "Can You Feel It" campaign is a 2021 Australian integrated advertising campaign created by Clemenger BBDO Sydney that resurrects the brand's beloved animated Bug characters in a road-trip film set to Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," delivering a positivity-led lifestyle platform across television, cinema, digital, social, and radio.
Launched on 23 July 2021 across the Australian market, the campaign marks a deliberate strategic and creative pivot for V Energy Drink and its parent company Frucor Suntory. Rather than positioning the brand within the extreme-sports territory that had long defined energy drink advertising, Clemenger BBDO Sydney constructed a platform anchored in positive feeling, social connection, and everyday vitality. The campaign's central question — "Can you feel it?" — functions as both a consumer challenge and a brand promise, inviting audiences to associate the energy surge delivered by V with a broader emotional and sensory experience.
At the heart of the creative is the return of the V Bugs: Muzza, Kaz, Roz, and Pook. Originally introduced in early 2000s Australian television advertising, the Bugs were reimagined for 2021 as human-sized animated characters, produced in partnership with Psyop, a New York-based animation and production company. The 30-second television commercial places the four characters together in a car on a road trip, singing along to the infectiously upbeat Wham! track in a sequence designed to generate immediate warmth and recognition. A planned TikTok extension, as reported by Campaign Brief, was scheduled to follow the integrated launch, targeting a Gen Z audience in Australia who would encounter the Bugs for the first time. The campaign earned a Clio Awards Bronze in the Film Craft — Animation category, confirming its standing as a piece of genuine craft within the non-alcoholic drinks category.
V Energy Drink competes in one of Australia's most contested beverage segments. Australia's energy drinks market reached approximately AUD 1.674 billion, according to researchandmarkets.com, reflecting a category where consumer attention is fought for by globally scaled players and aggressively marketed local alternatives alike. In the Australian market, V Energy Drink's primary competitive set includes Red Bull, Monster, Mother, and Rockstar, each commanding meaningful shelf presence and distinct brand territories.
Red Bull and Monster, in particular, have historically dominated the action-sports and extreme-performance positioning that once defined the broader category. V Energy Drink's decision, as reported by adnews.com.au, to move away from that territory and toward positivity, music, and lifestyle energy represents a calculated effort to differentiate on emotional rather than functional grounds. This shift reflects a broader consumer insight: energy drink buyers in the 18-to-35 demographic increasingly seek products that mirror their identity and social values, not merely their physical needs. In Australia, where culture, music, and outdoor social life carry outsized resonance, a campaign rooted in joy and collective good feeling carries genuine strategic logic.
The choice to anchor the "Can You Feel It" platform to a nostalgia trigger — the return of the V Bugs and the Wham! soundtrack — also speaks to a dual-audience strategy. Existing V loyalists in Australia who remembered the early 2000s Bugs campaign would experience the return as a moment of brand affection, while younger audiences encountering the characters for the first time would absorb them through the lens of the contemporary lifestyle campaign. As Darren Wright, Executive Creative Director at Clemenger BBDO Sydney, stated: "When we launched the big brand idea of 'Can you feel it?' last year we wanted it to be a platform to put positive vibes into the world." That platform logic, grounded in cultural optimism, positions V Energy Drink as a brand of feeling rather than a brand of function.
Clemenger BBDO Sydney built the "Can You Feel It" creative around a single, high-commitment artistic choice: transforming V Energy Drink's cartoon Bug mascots into fully realised, human-scaled animated characters capable of anchoring a cinematic road-trip narrative. The execution demanded a production partner with the technical range to make that transformation feel both credible and charming, and Clemenger BBDO Sydney selected Psyop — a studio with an established international reputation in character animation and visual effects — to deliver it.
The resulting 30-second television commercial places Muzza, Kaz, Roz, and Pook inside a car, singing along to Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" with the kind of uninhibited, communal abandon that the campaign's "Can you feel it?" proposition demands. The Wham! soundtrack is not incidental. George Michael's voice and the song's irrepressible rhythm carry their own cultural memory in the Australian market, and the decision to pair that sonic energy with animated characters on a road trip creates a layered viewing experience: nostalgia for both the V Bugs and for an era of uncomplicated pop joy. The music licensing choice reinforces the campaign's broader tonal argument — that energy should feel celebratory rather than aggressive.
Executive Creative Director Darren Wright of Clemenger BBDO Sydney described the creative approach directly, as reported by campaignbrief.com: "With the help of the amazingly talented crew at Psyop, we put four random bugs in a car and got them to sing along to the incredibly infectious 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' by Wham." That framing — deliberately playful, self-aware — reflects the campaign's confidence in its own lightness. The animation style bridges the hand-drawn warmth of the original early 2000s V Bugs with the technical finish expected of contemporary Australian broadcast and cinema advertising, producing a piece of film that reads as both familiar and fresh across every channel in the integrated rollout.
V Energy Drink's "Can You Feel It" campaign achieves a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that demonstrates clear creative merit and strategic coherence while operating within the constraints of a single animated film execution supported by channel extensions.
On YouTube, the campaign's primary digital asset recorded 5,619,751 views and 150 likes, as documented in platform data cited by Clapboard. Those figures represent meaningful organic reach for an Australian market campaign within the non-alcoholic drinks category, where digital video competition for the 18-to-35 demographic is substantial. The view count reflects the campaign's broad integrated distribution across television, cinema, digital, social, and radio, with YouTube serving as the accessible long-term repository for Australian and international audiences.
The campaign's most formally recognised achievement is its Clio Awards Bronze in the Film Craft — Animation category, an internationally benchmarked industry award that confirms the quality of Psyop's animation work and Clemenger BBDO Sydney's creative direction. No additional verified performance data — including sales uplift, brand tracking movement, or share-of-voice metrics for the Australian energy drinks market — is publicly available for this campaign. What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign successfully executed against two simultaneous objectives: reintroducing a legacy brand asset to a new generation of Australian consumers and establishing "Can You Feel It" as a durable positive-vibes platform for V Energy Drink, with a TikTok extension planned to sustain momentum into the Gen Z segment of the market, as reported by Campaign Brief.
V Energy Drink's "Can You Feel It" is a 2021 Australian campaign by Clemenger BBDO Sydney. It revived the brand's animated Bug characters — Muzza, Kaz, Roz, and Pook — in a road-trip film set to Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," launching across television, cinema, digital, social, and radio on 23 July 2021.
Clemenger BBDO Sydney created "Can You Feel It" for V Energy Drink, owned by Frucor Suntory. Animation and production were handled by Psyop. Darren Wright served as Executive Creative Director at Clemenger BBDO Sydney and is the named creative lead on the campaign, as reported by campaignbrief.com.
The "Can You Feel It" campaign won a Clio Awards Bronze in the Film Craft — Animation category. The award recognises the quality of the animated execution produced by Psyop in partnership with Clemenger BBDO Sydney, and represents the campaign's primary formally documented industry recognition.
V Energy Drink selected Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" to anchor the campaign's positivity platform. The track's infectious rhythm and cultural familiarity in the Australian market reinforced the brand's shift away from extreme-sports energy toward joy, social connection, and everyday lifestyle vitality, as noted by adnews.com.au.
The V Bugs featured in "Can You Feel It" are named Muzza, Kaz, Roz, and Pook. Originally introduced in early 2000s Australian advertising, the characters were reimagined by Clemenger BBDO Sydney and Psyop as human-sized animated figures for the 2021 campaign, marking a deliberate revival of a legacy brand asset.
The "Can You Feel It" campaign recorded 5,619,751 views on YouTube, as documented by Clapboard. The figure reflects the campaign's integrated rollout across Australian television, cinema, digital, and social channels, with YouTube functioning as the primary long-form digital repository for the V Energy Drink film.
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