TV wine ads: Black Box targets younger consumers – but still doesn’t get it right

Adam Scott is funny, but why is he reinforcing the same old snotty wine stereotypes?

This new ad for Black Box, E&J Gallo’s best-selling boxed wine, does something that almost no wine ad does – targets consumers who aren’t old white guys.

For which it is to be commended. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing different here. The rest of the ad is little more than the same tired, cliched stereotypes that have plagued wine advertising since Orson Welles. In this, the ad bears more resemblance to this sad, four-decade old effort than something created in the age of TikTok.

But that’s the wine business for you.

So, yes, Adam Scott is funny, and he is familiar to the younger consumers the wine business so desperately needs. But what he’s doing is more or less the same thing that John Gielgud did in the aforementioned Paul Masson ad – reinforcing wine’s snobbery.

This is boxed wine. Why do we need a paneled library? Why is Scott dressed like someone in a 1940s English movie? And why oh why oh why does an agency type use the word “savviest” in some marketing-speak statement describing the ad’s brilliance? Wine isn’t savvy – wine is fun, damn it.

Know what would have been funnier and more effective? Put Scott at a picnic bench (he starred in “Parks and Recreation” after all), corkscrew in hand, trying to open the box. Then, proceed from there.

Because, as the blog’s official wine marketer told me when we discussed the ad, “This doesn’t break any new ground, even falling back on the gold medal awards cliché. And that was done poorly — the snark of the ad implies the medals are a sham, too.”

And he isn’t alone in that. The Gielgud ad’s co-creator left a comment on the post saying, yes, it was a lousy ad, no matter how well-intentioned it seemed at the time. Would that the Scott ad agency had seen his comment.

Fortunately, they can see it now.

Video: Black Box Wines via YouTube

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