Starbucks: CGI & FOOH

We put Starbucks into real cities with CGI: pumpkin balloons over Bucharest in 2023, then one pop-up storybook in eight capitals in 2024.

Client

Starbucks (AmRest)

Brands

Starbucks, Pumpkin Spice Latte

Year

2023-2024

Markets

Romania, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Serbia

What we did

Idea, Plate shoots, CGI, Compositing, Localization, Voiceover, Social, Paid social

The brief

We ran Starbucks Romania’s social channels in 2023 and 2024 for AmRest, which operates Starbucks in Central and Eastern Europe. The CGI grew out of that. The Pumpkin Spice Latte launch is a big event for Starbucks every year, and in September 2023 we wanted content the size of the hype.

A year later the brief got bigger. In August 2024 AmRest asked for one Holiday CGI campaign for all its markets, with a “strong local touch” in each.

The idea

Take a street everyone in town knows, park something enormous on it and post it as if a stranger had filmed it on the way to work. The plates are real. The giant thing in the middle is CGI.

Then people argue in the comments about whether they really saw it. The client’s own PSL recap said that argument made the videos go viral, on “Instagram but most on TikTok”. We ran the same trick again in 2024, in eight capitals at once.

How it worked

#PSLinvasion, September 2023

We filmed plates at four Romanian landmarks. The clips ran on Starbucks Romania’s Instagram, TikTok and Facebook between 5 and 20 September, with paid media behind them. First came pumpkin hot-air balloons carrying PSL cups over the Palace of Parliament: “Toamnă e atunci când zboară dovlecii” (autumn is when the pumpkins fly). On TikTok that clip alone did 1.3M plays.

Each landmark got its own joke. A mechanical pumpkin opened on top of ASE, the economics university, for the student crowd. A PSL Ferris wheel turned in Tei park (“PSL with a view!”). A pumpkin avalanche came down the Transfăgărășan under a traffic alert: “Atenție! Circulație blocată din cauza unei avalanșe.” (Warning: road blocked by an avalanche.) Two teasers, an Instagram filter, a PSL Spotify playlist and influencer seeding ran around them.

Bulgaria got its own version: a PSL Ferris wheel over a pedestrian street in Sofia. In Romania the clips pulled 7.2M views, the brand’s most successful content in the region up to then.

Holiday 2024, eight capitals

By then AmRest had seen #PSLinvasion and our Starbucks Rewards launch with Irina Rimes in Romania.

“We loved your previous work: PSL, Rewards, so we thought there’s no better team to take this challenge!”

We sent three concepts on 13 September 2024. A week later every market chose the same one: a giant pop-up storybook, the “Starbucks Christmas Story”, landing on each capital’s main square. In the teaser the closed book appears and a voice asks what it is. In the launch film it opens, and Toffee Nut Latte and Gingerbread Latte pop up next to a gingerbread house and carousel horses.

We built the book once, then shot a plate in each city: Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Bratislava, Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw and Belgrade. Each got a voiceover in its own language, plus its own fixes. The Czech book has a Czech title, Kouzelný šálek. Germany got Signature Hot Chocolate in a red cup. Belgrade moved to Republic Square at the Serbian team’s request, and in Budapest we painted out a construction site.

Teasers went live in late October, once the global embargo lifted, and the launch films in November. The last one, Budapest, was delivered on 12 November. The next day the client wrote back: “Wow, that was a crazy ride, wasn’t it?!”

Results

Credits

• Client: Starbucks (AmRest)
• Agency: Tuio

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