Skyy Vodka taps John Cena for 'Proudly American' campaign

Dive Brief:

Skyy Vodka is adding WWE star and actor John Cena to its "Proudly American" campaign, which includes a new digital video "The Pledge," a news release announced.
In "The Pledge," Cena narrates a humorous take on the “Pledge of Allegiance” that celebrates inclusivity and freedoms like "writing your own history" and "you being you." The spot was directed by female director J.J. Adler and features music by Bangladeshi-American artist Jai Wolf.
The campaign includes out-of-home, digital, social media, PR and event activations. In addition to "The Pledge," Cena shared a spot that parodied boy bands that has more than one million views on Twitter at press time.

Dive Insight:

San Francisco-based Skyy continues to celebrate the diversity of America with its "Proudly American" campaign, which launched earlier this year to explore American values, how they've evolved and how they're interpreted today.

Tapping Cena, known for being hardworking and humorous, will extend the campaign's focus on inclusivity and optimism. Cena joins others activists and influencers featured in the campaign, including openly gay Olympian Gus Kenworthy, writer Kimberly Drew and "RuPaul’s Drag Race" stars Trixie Mattel and Dusty Ray Bottoms. He also provides a sizable Twitter following (11.4 million) that could help the boy band parody ad go viral and find more engagement with younger, social media-obsessed consumers.

Highlighting diversity and promoting inclusivity are marketing messages that are most likely to resonate with millennial consumers, who have also shown a preference for spirits. Sixty percent of Gen Z consumers and 58% of millennials think that "changing ideas about gender are allowing more people to be themselves," according to a Barkley and Futurecast survey. Most younger consumers also support multiculturalism and prefer movies and TV to feature multicultural casts.

A modern idea of America, including diversity, has been a marketing theme that other U.S.-based alcohol brands have embraced recently. Beer brand Pabst Blue Ribbon released a campaign in May to explore what the American Dream means to millennials, who are the most racially diverse adult generation in American history. The brand partnered with Vice on two documentaries and a portrait series about the ever-changing American Dream. The campaign also included a hotline and people were encouraged to leave a voicemail describing their individual American Dream.