Naked Wines: The Middleman

When you really get down to the bottom line of wine, there is one person who is making wine more expensive than it should be: The Middleman. Naked Wines wanted to make wine drinkers aware of the century-old, three-tiered wine industry model that results in high markups on the bottles of wine you can buy in stores. So creative lab CALLEN made an unscrupulous, rich and unapologetic character out of The Middleman, who shows how your expensive wine pays for his personal proclivities - including a tennis court, a bigger hot tub, and exotic animals. Naked Wines is a direct-to-consumer winery business, differentiated by its investment in exceptionally talented independent winemakers - “the world’s best.” In spots for the brand’s first-scale national campaign in the United States, The Middleman is the absurd villain that has emerged from the mindless continuation of outdated wine rules and sales practices, not the quality of an economical bottle of wine. The campaign aims to call out Middlemen as marking up wine sold from the shelves. In one spot, the Middleman is shown in his deadly, 80s dad-pad delineating his ways of marking up store-bought wine prices. As he talks, his workers blow bubbles into his indoor jacuzzi while he shares a carrot with his pet giraffe. In another spot, The Middleman is cradled, baby carrier style, by a strong tennis pro while he sips his espresso and says, “If I used my own legs, I’d say they’re cutting them [the prices] out from underneath me.” CALLEN tried to do as much in-camera as possible to create the extravagant scenes — from constructing a custom, stretch-luxury-sports-car-limo with a bathtub in the back that measured 14 meters long, to an animatronic giraffe, to a jacuzzi with a built-in retractable TV screen.