Quality Meats takes us to the low high hills of Herb Light
The agency uses gently surreal gen AI to sell its first self-created consumer product, a non-alcoholic, low-dose THC lager.
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Credits
View on- Agency Quality Meats/Chicago
- Production Company Sandwiches
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Credits
View on- Agency Quality Meats/Chicago
- Production Company Sandwiches
- Founder/Chief Creative Officer Gordy Sang
- Founder/Chief Creative Officer Brian Siedband
- Art Director Logan Murray
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Credits
powered by- Agency Quality Meats/Chicago
- Production Company Sandwiches
- Founder/Chief Creative Officer Gordy Sang
- Founder/Chief Creative Officer Brian Siedband
- Art Director Logan Murray
With a history of helping out homegrown, Chicago-based companies like The Wiener’s Circle and Mr. Submarine, as well as creating a tongue-in-cheek premium canned-water brand for City of Chicago called Chicagwa, it seems like a natural step for Quality Meats to put itself on the other side of the brief and create a local consumer brand of its own.
With Herb Light, QM founders Gordy Sang and Brian Siedband are dipping their toes into the ever-growing world of THC-infused drinks, launching the product with a series of retro-tinged, Gen AI-created spots from in-house production company Sandwiches, extolling the virtues of its booze-free, low-dose buzz.
Cleverly keeping the AI-ness down to a minimum and instead using the technique to give 80s-styled films a sprinkling of surreality (albeit with the ever-tight copywriting the agency is known for), the campaign feels like a relic with a little buzz to it.
“We all know THC drinks didn’t exist in the 80s. But it's fun to imagine if they did,” says Brian Siedband, Herb Light co-founder and Quality Meats co-founder and Co-CCO. “So every aspect of this brand is leaning into basically an alternate timeline where it did. And how it would have solved the same pain points back then that it does now. Which is completely absurd but reinforces the light beer-ness of it all.”
“The main reason this product exists is because I wanted it selfishly just for me,” says Herb Light co-founder and Quality Meats Co-Founder and Co-CCO, Gordy Sang. “I like drinking beer, but I don’t like feeling hungover, and I like some cannabis, but I don’t want to be higher than balls. So I went and made a drink that I can keep drinking all day in social settings, where I have a pathological need to constantly have a drink in my hand that I can continuously pour into my face.”
To turn the idea into an actual product, Sang and Siedband teamed up with Jon Schiff, with whom they had previously launched Chicago food, juice and smoothie chain Real Good Stuff Co., bringing him on as Herb Light’s co-founder and CEO.
“Everyone on earth knows what a light beer is, and how you can drink more and feel the effects less than a regular beer, and a lot of people love light beer taste,” says Schiff. “So we’re leaning into that math as a mental shortcut, but instead of a little alcohol, it’s no alcohol and a little THC.”
