Culture · [3] min read

On a concept campaign for Aperol, and why “aspirational” has an expiry date.

For about twenty years, the answer to “who should our customer want to be?” was easy. Twenty-two. Sun-kissed. Laughing at something just out of frame, on a terrace that has never once had a wasp problem.

It worked. It worked so well that it became the default, and defaults have a funny way of outliving the reason they were set.

Right now, the most aspirational person on an Italian terrace might be a seventy-year-old retired man in a linen jacket, who has ordered the same drink at the same table since roughly 1978. He is not trying to be photographed. He is not trying at all. That’s the point.

Aspiration is a reading, not a demographic

The mistake is to think “inspirational” is a type of person. It isn’t. It’s a reading of what people are tired of, and who already has the thing they’re missing.

When everything is optimised, filtered and performed, the scarce thing stops being youth or beauty. It becomes ease. Ritual. Time. The confidence of someone who doesn’t need you to watch.

And who has that in abundance? People who stopped performing decades ago. The sciura — Milan’s impeccably put-together signora of a certain age — and her husband, who has opinions about how thick the orange slice should be. (Correct opinions. Unshakeable. Never stubborn.)

Sometimes the face of the moment is a twenty-year-old model. Sometimes it’s him. The job is knowing which one it is now, not which one it was when the last brief was written.

The concept

Fun is wasted on the young is a self-initiated concept campaign for Aperol, built on one heritage reframe: the aperitivo was never a youth ritual. It’s the six o’clock pause — a habit older generations have been practising, quietly and expertly, for their whole lives.

So the campaign hands the drink back to the people who’ve been doing it longest. Not as nostalgia. As authority. They are the ones who know how to do this properly, and everyone else is, at best, an apprentice.

The young aren’t excluded. They just stop being the heroes and start being the audience — which, if you’ve ever watched a twenty-five-year-old study how an older Italian man wears a scarf, is already happening. The campaign simply admits it.

How you read the room

Architects learn early that a piazza is never used the way the plan says it will be. You watch where people actually sit, where they linger, which bench everyone avoids. The drawing is a hypothesis; the behaviour is the answer.

Culture works the same way. Three questions I keep coming back to:

Answer those honestly and the casting usually decides itself. Ignore them and you end up with a very expensive photo of a terrace nobody recognises.

It will shift again

This isn’t an argument that older is the new young, or that the twenty-year-old model is over. She’ll be back. Culture swings, and the pendulum doesn’t care about anyone’s brand guidelines.

The argument is simpler: inspiration has a timestamp. The brands that stay interesting are the ones that check it — before the brief does.

In the meantime, I’ll be at the table by the window. Learning. 🍷