Marketing Beat: Jimmy’s Iced Coffee Asks “Who Got The Beans”

British cartoned RTD coffee company Jimmy’s Iced Coffee released the second video last week for what’s shaping up to be a series of promotional rap songs. The new video, “Who Got the Beans,” is perhaps a slight step up in production value from their earlier effort, “Keep Your Chin Up,” released almost exactly one year ago, although the craft of both of these spots, both musically and visually, are as polished as anything else in the professional entertainment sphere.

In the year since its release, the 3.5-minute “Keep Your Chin Up” video has accrued over 1 million views on YouTube. Time will tell if the follow-up strikes equivalent internet gold, which the company has seemingly been mining with good fun and shrewd branding acumen in over 30 video posts on YouTube over the past couple of years.

Founded in 2011 by brother-sister duo Jimmy and Suzie Cregan in Dorset, UK, all of the sweetened milk-dependent coffee beverage company’s videos rely heavily and safely on the company’s ever-entertaining bearded ham of a co-founder, whose laddish affability and humor pervades in every clip. A couple early favorites include the announcement of the discontinuation of Jimmy’s Iced Coffee Decaf, and the pitch-perfect cap-flicking bulletin regarding the products’ availability at David Lloyd Gyms.

As for the relationship between rap music and consumerism, that’s certainly nothing new, given that rappers have referenced brands and products in their songs for practically as long as words have been set to hip-hop beats. While originally this connection had more to do with a reflection of artists’ lifestyles and aspirations, rap music and rappers themselves became direct vehicles for purely advertorial productions quickly upon the medium’s achievement of mainstream popularity. Since last year’s release by Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, another unrelated but also entertainingly oddball coffee-rap ad has come from Indian instant coffee brand Tata Coffee Grand.

These Jimmy’s ads, however, are both longer and more clearly the work of people that all at once love rap music, the art of music videos and the accomplishments of a successful independent business.

Cregan’s face and personality are at the core of the brand, therefore while in keeping with the traditional braggadocio of rap music, the songs also seem indicative of the modern era of social media and total transparency, promoting the brand and endearing its creator perhaps even more so than the products themselves. The one glaring omission from the specialty coffee perspective is any nod to the farmers of the coffees in Jimmy’s products, which are not literally, as mentioned in the lyrics, “homegrown” in the U.K.. Other than that, we’re happy to give mad props to the Jimmy’s crew for these impressive feats of brand-building entertainment.