Created with Ogilvy Vietnam, the ‘Hydration Breaks The Ads’ campaign responded to frustration among football fans with hydration breaks that are often filled with back-to-back ads.
La Vie
Ogilvy Vietnam
With football fans at home getting frustrated when hydration breaks feel more like ad breaks, Ogilvy Vietnam collaborated with Vietnam water brand La Vie to turn hydration breaks back into what they were meant for: actual hydration.
Instead of investing in TV ads, La Vie “invests” in the fans to get hydrated.
To learn more about the ‘Hydration Breaks the Ads’ campaign, we spoke with the team from Ogilvy Vietnam.
Football season is the time many brands pay millions for ads to promote themselves. This can feel intrusive and exploitative especially when it starts to interrupt fans’ experience.
Through this idea, we want fans to be the people who truly benefit. Instead of paying for ads, we let fans do what they’re meant to do during the hydration breaks and get money for it, playfully turning them into our own human ads.
It started with a simple thought: how can we help La Vie, a water brand, tap into football fan culture with something uniquely about… water?
As conversations around hydration breaks surged among Vietnamese fans, we recognized a natural opportunity to bring real utility to people staying up late and “drying their throats” while cheering.
With time against us, AI-generated visuals could have been the easy answer. But authentic joy, especially in sport, isn’t something you can prompt.
This insight became the perfect expression of La Vie+ Alkaline’s fandom platform, “Cheering is Movement”. By reframing cheering as a physical activity that deserves hydration, the brand turned a passive viewing moment into an active one – making La Vie+ Alkaline a relevant companion for every hydration break.
Time was our biggest obstacle. We wished this idea had come sooner, but it only came when the breaks became a real heated topic in Vietnam at the near end of the season.
We couldn’t “Christopher Nolan it”. Therefore, we had to gulp down and make the execution as simple as possible, without sacrificing the impact.
Quick announcement, quick asset production. Hectic days as we worked around the clock to maximize the reach of the campaign without a predetermined media plan.
This campaign builds on La Vie+ Alkaline’s platform of encouraging people not to bottle up, but to go all out for the moments that matter in sport. Staying true to this human-centered belief, we also upheld our commitment to real human craft.
Who can hate ads when the ads are themselves?
With time against us, AI-generated visuals could have been the easy answer. But authentic joy, especially in sport, isn’t something you can prompt. We produced a photoshoot in one day, capturing the genuine rituals, emotions, and late-night cheering habitats of Vietnamese football fans that make the campaign look and feel uniquely local.
For a brand stepping into the football playground for the first time, becoming a natural part of the conversation was the biggest win of all.
Plus hundreds of human ads of authentic drinking moments. And then came the priceless reactions from football communities. “Finally, a reason to enjoy hydration breaks”, or our favorite kind of blame: “Why didn’t you do this earlier?”
All images via Ogilvy Vietnam and YouTube.
