Fall in StrangeLove
Awarness Campaign
Through bold visuals and emotionally charged storytelling, Fall in StrangeLove invites people to reconnect with their instincts, to love things for no reason, to feel without needing justification. It’s a celebration of authenticity, contradiction, and the strange beauty of being human.
THE BRIEF
The challenge was to develop a brand awareness campaign for StrangeLove Soda as it entered Coles, a major shift from niche distribution to the mainstream retail environment. The brand had strong equity among design-conscious consumers but low prompted awareness beyond boutique cafés and specialty stores. The goal was clear: broaden visibility without diluting the brand’s distinct personality.
In a beverage landscape dominated by wellness claims and functionality, “detox,” “low sugar,” “gut health”, StrangeLove stood apart. Its wit, surreal tone, and irreverence gave it the perfect platform to reject logic entirely. The brief called for an awareness campaign that could make StrangeLove seen, felt, and talked about, something emotional, not informational.
THE CONCEPT
The campaign, Fall in StrangeLove, was built on the insight that “people don’t love rationally; they love instinctively.” This became the foundation for the creative platform “Drink for Drink’s Sake”, a line that flipped the logic of the category by celebrating emotion over function. Rather than convincing consumers why they should drink StrangeLove, the campaign showed that the best reasons often don’t make sense at all.
The concept positioned StrangeLove as a brand that doesn’t ask for justification, it’s about irrational joy, instinctive love, and the strange beauty of simply feeling something. It reframed the act of drinking a soda as a moment of emotional recognition, an everyday indulgence that connects people to their quirks, habits, and odd little comforts.
WHAT I DID
I led the campaign through every stage, strategy, creative direction, and production. I designed the creative platform, visual identity, and campaign rollout, ensuring the work aligned with both brand heritage and new market objectives. This included:
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Developing the insight, positioning, and tone of voice.
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Art directing all AI imagery using Midjourney, Leonardo, and Photoshop refinement.
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Producing a short-form brand film through Runway and Premiere Pro.
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Designing key OOH, radio, and social media executions.
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Creating new packaging designs featuring relatable quirks and one-liners that made people see themselves and their friends in each can.
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Incorporating feedback from By All Means mentors, refining tone to feel instinctive and human.
MEDIA
Each medium played a distinct emotional role in the awareness funnel:
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OOH (Billboards, Tram Wraps, Metrolites): Clean layouts, surreal imagery, and short declarative lines acted as “public mirrors,” showing people their own behaviours in the streets they move through.
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Radio (The Human Shoutout): Playful voiceovers celebrated individuals and their strange loves, making listeners feel seen, not sold to.
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Social Media: Became the community space for audience participation. Lo-fi, AI-assisted content invited people to share their own quirks, creating organic brand conversation.
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Film / TVC: Served as the emotional core, a poetic, sensory short exploring small rituals and irrational comforts. Imperfect, grainy textures made it feel real and nostalgic.
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Packaging: Each can became an everyday artefact of the campaign, featuring subtle illustrations and lines like “Keeps every candle jar” or “Still remembers their Myspace password.” It turned the product into a cultural collectible, a physical touchpoint of shared identity and recognition.
WHY IT WORKS
As an awareness campaign, Fall in StrangeLove succeeds because it does what awareness should do, it makes people see themselves. Every touchpoint reflects back human behaviour in a way that feels personal, humorous, and true. Instead of shouting the brand’s benefits, it lets the audience recognise their own.
StrangeLove’s consumers are design-literate, culturally fluent, and emotionally aware. They don’t want to be told what to do; they want to be seen. This campaign achieves that through tone and recognition, peeling fruit stickers, sniffing petrol, talking to plants. These quirks became emotional entry points that built brand salience through empathy and humour. It transforms “a soda ad” into a moment of shared understanding.
From a strategic standpoint, this human approach is what makes Fall in StrangeLove cut through. Where other brands sell control, StrangeLove celebrates chaos. It creates cultural value, not just awareness, by positioning irrationality as a new form of authenticity, an antidote to the moralised wellness world.
AI INTERGRATION
AI became an integral part of the creative process, both strategically and creatively. The intention was not to replace human craft but to enhance experimentation, efficiency, and scale while maintaining emotional authenticity.
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Strategic Use: At the early stages, ChatGPT was used to structure creative thinking — to map tone, behaviour, and cultural insight. Rather than generating copy, it functioned as a thought partner to test logic, rhythm, and conceptual angles. Prompts were written like creative briefs, forcing clarity and precision. For example, “Translate the feeling of irrational love into behavioural motifs suitable for lifestyle advertising.” This use of AI as a thinking accelerator helped externalise abstract ideas and uncover linguistic patterns that shaped the campaign tone.
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Visual Development: Midjourney and Leonardo AI were used to explore visual possibilities — pushing beyond what could be photographed or staged within student constraints. Midjourney provided mood and tone, generating surreal scenes that captured StrangeLove’s irreverent energy. Leonardo was then used to refine and direct imagery, allowing greater precision and consistency across brand assets. Each can was isolated and composited in Adobe Illustrator before being fed into Leonardo with layered prompts describing lighting, materials, and atmosphere (e.g. “A StrangeLove can resting on velvet surrounded by melting ice, cinematic soft lighting, irrational intimacy”).
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Motion Integration: Runway ML extended these visuals into moving image. Using Leonardo-generated stills as a base, I applied short, descriptive prompts to create subtle cinematic motion — dreamlike zooms, shifting light, and surreal transitions. This process turned stills into emotional loops, capturing the feeling of small, beautiful irrationalities.
AI revealed its greatest strength in acceleration and iteration — allowing hundreds of visual experiments in minutes. But its weakness was emotion. It could mimic aesthetic, not meaning. That’s where human art direction came in: to curate, distort, and inject imperfection back into the work. I found myself acting more as a conductor than a maker — orchestrating between intuition and technology to achieve emotional precision.
GROUP MEMBERS
This project was developed independently, with professional mentorship from By All Means (BAM) creatives Liam and Ed, whose feedback reshaped both the strategic clarity and creative tone. Their insights into copy, presentation, and idea-selling elevated the campaign from visually interesting to conceptually coherent. They encouraged me to focus on communicating meaning over aesthetic polish, and to present creative ideas in ways that translate effectively to clients, a skill that grounded the work in industry realism.
SUMMARY
Fall in StrangeLove is not just an awareness campaign, it’s a creative statement about what advertising can be when emotion, technology, and strategy converge. It works because it doesn’t tell people what to feel; it reminds them that they already do. In a world obsessed with reasons, Fall in StrangeLove makes feeling, irrational, imperfect, and human, the reason itself.
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