Tito’s Handmade Vodka has named Arts & Letters as its first lead brand creative partner. The appointment was made without a review. 

The decision to bring on an agency came after Tito’s worked with the Richmond, Virginia-based agency on its “Tito’s in a Can” campaign in August. The campaign mocked the surge in the number of alcohol brands entering the canned cocktail and hard seltzer business over the past few years. Instead of offering a new canned cocktail product, the vodka brand sold a limited supply of 16-ounce, double-steel walled, insulated, refillable cans designed with “nutrition facts” that are actually recipes to make Tito’s-based cocktails.

Tito's stayed away from agencies in the past, instead putting money from its marketing budget into philanthropy, according to Taylor Berry, VP of brand marketing at Tito's. "That still hasn't changed. I've just reallocated my budget because I think at the end of the day when I saw something like the 'Titos in a Can' success that we had…and the relationship that our teams have with each other, it didn't feel like we're outsourcing things to an agency necessarily.”

Berry said he was initially hoping to sell half of the cans allotted for the campaign. Within three days of the ads breaking, Tito’s had sold all 10,000 cans. The proceeds from the products sold went to charity, according to Berry, who said it helped bring significant awareness to the company.

“You're talking about 500 million plus impressions and the earned coverage that we got, and just the groundswell of people recognizing that Tito's is standing their ground in the seltzer wars—that was the No. 1 thing that we were trying to get across,” Berry said.

Not a stunt brand

Despite the success of the work, Tito’s doesn’t want to become a “stunt brand” and its work with Arts & Letters won’t be focused solely on campaigns like the “Tito’s in a Can” effort. “Stunts untethered from a strategy are just tactics,” said Charles Hodges, founder and executive creative director at Arts & Letters. “How everything works together is what makes us excited about the future.”

The relationship with Arts & Letters was also necessary to help the brand navigate what Berry says can be a “fickle” industry.

“There are trends that come out of nowhere and you have certain categories end up just absolutely blowing up and then they go away,” Berry said. “Vodka is kind of like this stagnant thing that's always there. And you've got all these other trends happening across the alcohol business and whether we need to go fight them or not is to be determined. But to have a partner that can identify those opportunities and figure out what the strategies are around them, I think is going to be the most fruitful thing about this.”

Tito’s will continue to produce some of its own marketing in-house but will look to Arts & Letters to lead creative brand strategy.

This is the latest win for the independent agency, which was recently named lead creative partner for ESPN and will be tasked with reviving the brand’s iconic “This is Sportscenter” ads. Arts & Letters also took on lead creative duties for Zola in January and later this year took on Constant Contact.

Spirits leader

In 2020, Tito’s became the top-selling spirits brand in the U.S. In 2021, it sold 11 million cases, a 6.3% increase from the year earlier, according to Shanken News Daily. Berry declined to comment on those numbers, but he said he believes the vodka brand’s rank as the lead brand in the space will remain the same this year.

Tito’s recent growth comes despite the company spending a fraction of its rivals' marketing budget. Tito’s spent $4.2 million on U.S.-measured media last year, according to Kantar. This year the brand spent $2.1 million in the first half of 2022, which is slightly higher than the $1.1 million Tito’s spent in the first half of 2021. Berry declined to comment on Tito’s marketing spending.

In comparison, Diageo spent $23 million in U.S.-measured media on Smirnoff in 2021, according to Kantar. Smirnoff named McCann as its new global creative agency of record in November.