News

Henry Westons cider launches TV campaign

Henry Westons Vintage, the UK’s largest traditional premium cider brand*, is launching its first TV campaign, which kicked off nationally last week, as well as an on-pack promotion. The campaign will run throughout the summer and heroes Henry Weston, the man behind the cider, who is also Westons founder. This forms part of a £1m investment into the Henry Westons Vintage brand this year.

The Cider with Character TV ad will air throughout May and June and will include a second burst of air-time during August and September. The ad will reach 12 million of Henry Westons core target audience, and will feature across a number of prime-time TV channels.

The TV ad, which includes a 20-second and 10-second version, uses an animated style and opens on a wide shot of a beautiful orchard with the Malvern Hills beyond. It then shows a Heath Robinson-style machine, which is a giant automated apple picker with a long mechanical arm and one giant, white-gloved hand. The hand efficiently drops the apples onto a small conveyor belt.

The ad then cuts to Henry, sipping from a ladle, testing the cider. The giant white hand on the machine soon gives a big thumbs-up to show Henry’s approval. The narrator tells the audience that ‘Henry Westons Vintage is made from the finest Herefordshire apples… from a single year… aged in oak vats… very slowly… for a magnificent taste to savour. Henry Westons Vintage. Cider with Character.’

The on-pack promotion will feature on 3.2 million bottles nationally during May and June, giving consumers the chance to win a trip to New York, the ‘Big Apple’. Drinkers need simply go onto the Henry Westons Jazz website and fill out the last four digits of the bottle’s bar code to be entered into the competition.

Westons Cider is now run by the fourth generation of the Weston family, which has been producing traditional English cider in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle since 1880. Westons makes a broad range of ciders for the premium cider sector with its other key brands including Stowford Press, Wyld Wood Organic Cider, Old Rosie, Mortimer’s Orchard and Caple Rd Cider, the UK’s first craft cider in a can.

*The Henry Westons Vintage brand is now growing at 15% and is worth £29.6m, IRI 52 weeks ending 26th March 2016.