Celebrating Celebration

celebrating, artfully

The act of celebration has been permeating the American streets since the election was called a little before midnight Tuesday night. In New York, Barack Obama supporters congregated to celebrate victory in a rare moment of patriotism and even bonding with strangers. It was a night of fireworks, high-fives, hugs, song, oh and booze…

No celebration is complete without an iconic bottle of bubbly or another festive beverage of choice. Or so we have been told. This is an idea alcohol marketers have been clinging to since marketing and advertising were first introduced. The task (beyond making your campaign interesting) has become finding a way to distinguish your brand from all those other celebratory spirits. Who is having the most fun at their party? And what makes that party so special?

A good starting point, from the marketers prospective, is to find that person with whom you want to be celebrating or want to feel like while celebrating. Identifying is key. It provides both a context and implies a certain ideal. And done tastefully, celebration itself can be an art form.

When Ciroc vodka branched out from France to the United States, they chose Diddy, a proven marketer and seasoned party thrower, to manage their outreach and to be their face. Most recently he represented the brand by representing an iconic figure himself, Frank Sinatra. Thus, toying with the idea that celebration is new, its old, its transcendent and it is really as creative and innovative as you want it to be. Because a celebration is inherently special and out of the ordinary, it only makes sense that celebrities too yearn for experiences outside what they know, something more surreal–as surreal as, say, electing an intelligent Democratic president.

And so, this week, Diddy hosted a party celebrating Barack Obama’s victory in the spirit of Ciroc, in the spirit of Frank, and in hopes of creating tangible brand awareness linked to an actual warranted celebration. The brand is too new to predict how these efforts will pan-out, but bare minimum, for those in attendance, it was a night that proved a good celebration is a form of art, re-imagining imagination for real…

Tags: Barack Obama, Celebration, Celebrity Endorsements, Chelsie, Ciroc, Diddy, Election 2008, Frank Sinatra, Jay-Z, P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, Sean Combs, Serious Academic Investigations of Partying