Agency: TPN
Client: Lonestar
Copy: Greg Overhauls (Sr.CW)
Art direction: Jesús González (Sr.AD)
Strategy: Brook Hollander (Associate Strategist)
Doodle Illustrations: Luke Schroeder
This is probably one of my favorite projects I’ve ever worked on.
Lone Star was launching its first Mexican-style lager, Rio Jade, and our job was to build a retail world around it without losing what made the brand special. That meant balancing three very different voices: Lone Star, the long history and culture of Mexican-style lager, and the vision of Mexican-American artist Cruz Ortiz, who created the look of Rio Jade.
Cruz’s inspiration came from the colors of the Rio Grande and the rivers of Texas. I loved the idea of taking that world and pushing it further, so we carried the sun-washed desert palette through the retail materials and added little touches of vegetation that made the pieces feel like they belonged in the same landscape.
Then we found a way to make the campaign interactive.
Lone Star has a long tradition of printing riddles underneath its bottle caps, so we created a new set specifically for Rio Jade. We wrote riddles for Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, and Texas as a whole, and had each one illustrated in Cruz’s unmistakable style.
It was one of those projects where every little detail had a reason to exist, and that’s what made it so much fun to work on.
Even launching at the beginning of a global pandemic couldn't stop it. Rio Jade was originally meant to be a seasonal release, but the campaign and the beer performed so well that it became a permanent part of the Lone Star portfolio.