Responses by Gastón Gual and Alex Romero, creative directors at GUT Buenos Aires.
Background: This campaign connects the roots of Stella Artois to those of the art world through the finding that there is an elevated chance that the beer being portrayed in art history could actually be an Artois.
Design thinking: Once we connected the year of each painting to the origins of Stella Artois, our true thinking was to establish correlations between other variables that would help us calculate precisely what the chance was of each beer being an Artois. We developed this correlation alongside the Bellas Artes Museum of Buenos Aires with a mathematician and an art historian. We included year, type of glass, proximity, current distribution of our factory and potential competitors in the area.
Challenges: Creating a team to build that algorithm and make it relevant for the audience. Once we had the math done, we had to portray the art in an interesting way for people to appreciate it and also be impacted by the Stella Artois campaign.
Favorite details: We’re very proud that everything is real and authentic. We searched and oversaw lots of paintings, analyzed them and actually became proud of the results. Some of the paintings we found have a high chance of portraying Stella Artois and others aren’t as close. The percentages go from 20 to 86 percent and being that brutally honest about the campaign makes us really proud.
New lessons: We learned a lot. Basically, we had to review lots of paintings from many periods of art history with the historian and Bellas Artes. We learned about Flemish painters and the origins of Stella Artois, who really opened its brand history books to us.
Visual influences: We had many painters to investigate from many countries close to Stella Artois’s original brewery that were also visual inspiration for everything we did afterwards: Adriaen Brouwer, Pieter Bruegel, Denis Calvaert, Pieter Claesz, Pieter de Hooch, David Teniers, Vincent van Gogh, Willem van Herp and Lucas van Valckenborch, just to name some.