There was only one problem, it was illegal to advertise alcohol in Poland. Most brewers got around this by advertising non-alcoholic beer. Heineken/Zywiec didn't want to do this so we had a white box with Zywiec written on the side. There was no image of beer & so this didn't break the law. It also didn't sell very much beer.
Then a new President of Zywiec arrived in Poland. He was a very tall handsome Belgian and had come from Heineken in Africa. Even his name was large, President Jean Francois Van Boxmeer. He had apparently learnt 3 local languages in Africa & the rumour was that he learnt Polish in 3 months. He was clearly a very bright & capable man.
He saw our shitty creative work and told us to come up with some campaigns that were beer-ish not box-ish. We presented him our work a few weeks later at a very nervous meeting. Our creative director started to shakily show him the work.
After a few weak ideas were shown President Jean Francois Van Boxmeer used simple English to get his point across, "Stop Spending...Start Thinking" he said. We nodded in agreement at his wise words & wrote them down.
We showed a couple more poor campaigns. The large President said with more emphasis, "Stop Spending... Start Thinking." We underlined his earlier words.
We got halfway through the next average ad when Van Boxmeer stated loudly, "STOP SPENDING, START THINKING."
I looked across at the Client Service Director & mouthed the words, "We're fired."
The beer stopped arriving within a fortnight & we were quite rightly fired within a month. Today Jean Francois Van Boxmeer is the Chairman of Heineken Worldwide. To use his method of repetition to get a point across, he was clearly a very bright and capable man.
