Rum Raiders Ring - Studio Shoot to Campaign to Venue

Rum Raiders Ring makes four rums and four ready to drink seltzers. Spicy Siren, Twisted Jewel, Gilded Pearl, Pirate's Kiss.

The principals are Canadians who went to the Caribbean, built a rum company where rum actually comes from, then brought it home. That shows up everywhere: in the quality, in the commitment to all natural ingredients, and in the way the brand itself is built.

Good rum is genuinely hard to make, and it is what the whole line is built on. The seltzers start with that same rum rather than the neutral base most RTDs use, which is why they hold their flavour with no sugar and no carbs propping them up. Sugar is what you reach for when you have something to cover. There is nothing here to cover.

What they did not have yet was presence.

Most drinks brands in that position do the same thing: post product photos, buy some ads, wait for distribution. It fails because it asks a stranger to want a can they have never seen poured. I proposed the inverse. Shoot the product properly first, in a controlled studio where it can be made to look like what it is. Turn that one session into a campaign. Then put the brand back into the rooms where people are already deciding what to drink: restaurants, taverns, the places worth being seen in.

I shot both the cans and the bottles in my own studio.

The cans were shot on black, including a water tank so they could be dropped and caught mid-splash. That is not just a stylistic flourish. A can suspended in moving water reads as refreshing, carbonated and alive, which is the entire promise of the category, and it is very difficult to fake later.

The bottles went the other way, against white, lit with several point sources to give the glass the glistening edge it needed.

Then I took those frames and the product references and used AI tooling to generate campaign variations: the White Rum bottle staged against sugar cane, the Spice Rum ad built around nutmeg, star anise and dried orange. Environments and styling that would each have needed their own shoot day, set build and prop budget.

The shoot stays real, the extensions come from it. That combination is the useful part. One studio session became a season of assets, without the brand ever looking like stock.

Cinematic social content shot inside partner venues, including HQ Golf and Social and Henry's on James, plus event nights. The pitch to a venue is simple, and it is why this works: the content elevates their room as much as it sells the rum.

Both films below are built the same way. Open on the studio product, cut to the room, close on the product again. The studio work and the venue work together, selling each other.

In-venue kit Table tents, shelf talkers, business cards and umbrellas. The full physical surface that puts a brand inside a bar rather than beside it.

A phased plan. Cultural placement using premium content, with physical brand presence in top tier venues at the same time. Then consumer acceleration as retail listings come through. Future paid social targeted to the radius around each partner venue rather than sprayed at the province.

The Rum Raiders Ring logo is not mine. I rebuilt and extended the existing brand into everything above: the product photography, the campaign imagery, the print kit, the venue films and the plan.