Suntory
-196

Suntory’s -196 arrived in Australia with a brand story built on sensation: whole lemons frozen at -196 degrees with freeze crush technology. At SXSW Sydney, surrounded by every brand fighting for attention, that story needed to be felt, not read off a can.

The activation had to work the way festival crowds do: on their phones, in their feeds, in seconds.

We built a social AR effect that hands the brand’s extreme-cold story to the audience. The -196 can appears encased in crystalline ice, with one invitation: tap for something extreme.

The payoff delivers the brand promise as spectacle, while a larger-than-life AR can planted on the festival grounds turned the product into a landmark you could walk around and film.

-196 sells a feeling: extreme cold, extreme flavour. Static media can only claim it. AR lets people trigger it themselves, watch it erupt over the product in their own hands and surroundings, and capture the moment as it happens.

Built camera-first for social platforms, every interaction ends a tap away from being shared, carrying @minus196au onto feeds far beyond the festival.

Festivalgoers found the giant frozen can on the SXSW Sydney grounds, opened the effect, and made the brand moment their own: tap, freeze, capture, post.

No app downloads, no queue, no staff walkthrough. The experience lives inside the camera people already have open at a festival.

The effect turned a festival audience into the campaign’s distribution, with every capture and share extending the launch beyond the event.

It gave -196 exactly what a challenger brand needs on debut: a moment people played with, remembered and passed on.