Burgenland Tourism Turns Six Wines Into Six Characters
Burgenland Tourism Board's 2022 campaign 'A Wine Advert without Any Wine!' is an Austrian travel and leisure campaign in which celebrated actor Nicholas Ofczarek physically embodies the character of six distinct DAC regional wines across six 17-second film spots, an extended director's cut, print advertising, and a social media campaign — without a single bottle or glass appearing on screen.
The campaign launched under the German-language line 'So einen Wein spielt's nur da', translated as 'Wine like this only stars here', with its world premiere held on 5 September 2022 at the Top Kino cinema in Vienna's Mariahilf district. Full multi-channel distribution followed on 6 September 2022, as reported by HORIZONT Austria, reaching audiences across television, radio, digital platforms, social media, print, and web video. The geographic market is Austria, with Burgenland — the country's easternmost federal state — positioned as both the subject and the setting of every frame.
The campaign was conceived by the House of Communication Vienna, which brought together Wien Nord Serviceplan, Now Serviceplan, and Mediaplus Austria under one creative and media roof. Its central objective is to communicate the singular character of Burgenland's internationally recognised red, white, and sweet wines — shaped by the region's distinctive Pannonian climate — in a way that no conventional product advertisement could achieve. By removing the wine from the advertisement entirely, the campaign forces the audience to encounter the wine's personality first, turning what might have been a commodity promotion into a cultural statement about place, craft, and identity. This is Burgenland Tourism Board's first major Nicholas Ofczarek-led creative platform, as documented by Burgenland At, marking a deliberate departure from category convention. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100.
Burgenland Tourism Board identified a fundamental tension at the heart of wine communication. The qualities that make Burgenland's six DAC wines exceptional — descriptors such as 'raw', 'edgy', 'velvety', or mineral — are experiential and sensory, not visual. A bottle conveys little of this. The strategic insight was that character acting, performed by one of Austria's most recognisable theatrical talents, could translate these oenophile qualities into emotion and narrative in a way that product photography or conventional tasting-note copy never could.
The campaign arrived at a moment when international tourism was in active recovery. According to the UN World Tourism Organization, more than 900 million international tourists travelled in 2022, approximately twice the 2021 figure but still 37% below 2019 levels. In that environment, destination marketing boards across Europe faced the challenge of converting renewed travel appetite into specific regional choices rather than simply broad country-level interest. For Burgenland, a region whose identity is inseparable from its wine culture, the campaign needed to do more than announce availability — it needed to assert distinctiveness.
By anchoring the creative platform to six named DAC wine regions — Leithaberg, Neusiedlersee, Rosalia, Mittelburgenland, Eisenberg, and Ruster Ausbruch — the strategy simultaneously educated audiences about Burgenland's appellations and created a serialised content structure across six individual films. As covered by medianet Austria on 7 September 2022, Ofczarek was positioned as an 'unconventional wine ambassador', a framing that acknowledged the campaign's deliberate subversion of category norms. The absence of competitive positioning against named rival campaigns or destinations reflects the campaign's inward focus: it argues for Burgenland on its own terms, treating the wines' characters as sufficient reason to visit.
Director Tessa Kadletz, working out of the production company Das Rund, helmed all six 17-second spots, each filmed on location in Burgenland's actual wine-growing vineyards. The production's commitment to authentic setting is deliberate: the landscape itself becomes evidence of the wines' origin, reinforcing the campaign's geographic argument without resorting to conventional product display.
On screen, Nicholas Ofczarek performs as the wine rather than alongside it. In each short film, he adopts a distinct physicality and temperament drawn from the specific character of the wine he is embodying. In one of the spots, filmed among the vines, Ofczarek bends to the soil, picks up a piece of flint, and bites into it — a visceral, wordless demonstration of the mineral quality that oenophiles associate with the region's terroir. Across the series, his performances move between the qualities named in the campaign's creative brief: raw, edgy, velvety, and others drawn from the language of serious wine description. Each spot corresponds to one of the six DAC designations — Leithaberg DAC Pinot Blanc, Neusiedlersee DAC Zweigelt, Rosalia DAC Rosé, Mittelburgenland DAC Blaufränkisch, Eisenberg DAC Blaufränkisch, and Ruster Ausbruch DAC.
The campaign's output extended well beyond the film series. A director's cut, a suite of print advertisements, and a dedicated social media campaign rounded out the creative system, as reported by both marcommnews.com and brandinginasia.com. The choice of a 17-second duration for each individual spot reflects the compressed, platform-agnostic reality of contemporary media consumption, while the director's cut served audiences seeking a fuller narrative experience. The House of Communication Vienna — integrating the creative work of Wien Nord Serviceplan and Now Serviceplan with the media planning of Mediaplus Austria — ensured the campaign's unusual creative logic was supported by distribution coherent enough to reach Burgenland Tourism's target audience across every relevant channel in Austria.
The campaign generated substantive editorial coverage at launch. HORIZONT Austria published launch coverage on 6 September 2022 identifying the six DAC wine regions as the structural backbone of the creative series. medianet Austria described Ofczarek as an 'unconventional wine ambassador' in its 7 September 2022 report. Additional coverage appeared in Meinbezirk At and Prima-Magazin At, confirming broad Austrian media pickup across both trade and regional consumer press, as documented by burgenland.at and Bvz At.
No independently verified audience reach, conversion, or sales performance data for this campaign is publicly available from named sources. What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign's multi-format architecture — six serialised short films, a director's cut, print, radio, television, digital, and social media — created multiple entry points for audience engagement across different consumption contexts. The serialised format, in which each of the six spots functions as a self-contained character portrait, is designed to reward repeated exposure: audiences encountering the campaign across channels accumulate a fuller picture of Burgenland's wine identity over time rather than receiving a single, undifferentiated message.
The decision to premiere the campaign at the Top Kino in Vienna's Mariahilf district — a venue associated with independent and art-house cinema — also signals an intentional alignment with a culturally engaged Austrian audience, one likely to respond to Ofczarek's theatrical reputation and to the campaign's formal ambition. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100 reflects strong creative distinctiveness and strategic coherence, with the score acknowledging the campaign's willingness to remove its core product from the frame entirely as a meaningful act of creative confidence.
'A Wine Advert without Any Wine!' is a 2022 Austrian travel campaign in which actor Nicholas Ofczarek embodies six Burgenland DAC wines through character acting, with no bottle or glass appearing on screen. It premiered on 5 September 2022 at Top Kino in Vienna and launched across TV, radio, digital, print, and social media the following day.
Nicholas Ofczarek is a prominent Austrian theatre actor and television star. Burgenland Tourism selected him because his signature character-acting technique could translate the sensory and emotional qualities of six DAC regional wines — descriptors like raw, edgy, and velvety — into performance, making the wines' personalities tangible without showing the product itself.
Ofczarek portrays six wines across six individual spots: Leithaberg DAC Pinot Blanc, Neusiedlersee DAC Zweigelt, Rosalia DAC Rosé, Mittelburgenland DAC Blaufränkisch, Eisenberg DAC Blaufränkisch, and Ruster Ausbruch DAC. Each film was shot on location in Burgenland's vineyards and directed by Tessa Kadletz of production company Das Rund.
The campaign was created by the House of Communication Vienna, bringing together Wien Nord Serviceplan and Now Serviceplan on creative and Now Serviceplan on production, with Mediaplus Austria handling media. It marked Burgenland Tourism Board's first major celebrity-led wine campaign platform, as documented by burgenland.at.
The campaign premiered on 5 September 2022 at Top Kino cinema in Vienna's Mariahilf district. Full multi-channel distribution began 6 September 2022, as reported by HORIZONT Austria, covering television, radio, digital, social media, print, and web video across the Austrian market.
The campaign received a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100. The score reflects strong creative distinctiveness — rooted in the decision to remove the product from the frame entirely — and strategic coherence in translating Burgenland's six DAC wine characters into serialised narrative performance across multiple media formats.
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