Jay Pond-Jones


SOL Beer
Limes
Mark Waites and I came up with this idea, and we pitched it to the Sol boss Harry Drnec. He loved it, and gave us the account there and then in the meeting. Harry instructed his media agency to get it out there fast.

Magazines came forward with the most amazing deals, often giving us outside back covers. We started sending out our agency runners to turn the magazines over in the local Soho newsagents. With the back covers showing, you’d be faced with the lime image scattered all over the shelves. This kind of larking around is now known as a stunt.

We didn’t actually manage to get Sol stickers onto the limes. We did try, but that sort of thing just didn’t happen in those days. This was 1991. We did try though.

What we did manage though was an early example of brand created content. We got Harry Drnec to agree to using the whistled Harry Lime theme as the soundtrack to a TV ad we made for the brand. We then lifted it as a music sample and put it into the dance track ‘She Got Soul’, which I wrote with a couple of mates, specifically to generate buzz around Sol.

It was released on A&M records in 1991 as Jamestown featuring Jocelyn Brown. It was record of the week on the Kiss FM Breakfast Show, and Sol got a few mentions. The PRS payments are still trickling in every six months.