In a saturated holiday landscape of peppermint packaging and commercial nostalgia, Aviation Gin took a different route in 2024. Its seasonal campaign, Spritzmas, didn’t just sell spirits—it staged a tongue-in-cheek cultural intervention.

The premise was simple but subversive: create a holiday universe around a fictional tradition, centered on a new cocktail called the Spritzmas Negroni. But rather than adhering to traditional festive tropes, the campaign hijacked the most familiar of holiday formats—the family postcard—and turned it into a surreal playground. Fans were invited to submit headshots; three winners would be Photoshopped into cinematic “holiday cards” alongside Aviation Gin bottles and improbably tiny cocktails. The resulting images were neither sentimental nor satirical—they were both.

The surreal tone of Spritzmas was further amplified by the appearance of actor Ryan Reynolds, who featured in the campaign’s video content. Reynolds, known for his self-aware brand of humor, has been closely associated with Aviation Gin since acquiring a stake in the company from Davos Brands in 2018. His involvement in Spritzmas added a layer of meta-commentary, blending celebrity, commerce, and performance in a way that reflected the campaign’s broader play with identity and ritual.

And the architect behind this visual reimagining was Chenguang Deng, an acclaimed lead designer at The Real Travel Agency, whose visual direction transformed brand humor into an immersive aesthetic language that invited audience participation—and cultural co-authorship. Under Deng’s art direction, the campaign unfolded as a tightly choreographed stream of visuals and media moments across social platforms. From static launch posts and Instagram Reels to recipe videos and whimsical Spritzmas cards, each element functioned within a consistent visual system—gleefully artificial yet oddly intimate. The color palettes leaned into the heightened reds and metallics of seasonal clichés, but rendered them with deliberate artificiality: snow globes, tinsel, and gin bottles staged like props in a Wes Anderson short.

What made Spritzmas notable wasn’t just its irony or interactivity—it was how the campaign used visual design to reframe cultural rituals. Where most holiday marketing traffics in sentimentality, Spritzmas emphasized play. By inviting users to remix their own image into this fictional tradition, the campaign blurred the line between brand and audience, artifice and ritual, designer and co-conspirator. In doing so, it didn’t just parody the holidays—it proposed a new kind of seasonal language, one built from Photoshop, participation, and cultural fluency.

For Deng, this wasn’t an isolated case. His broader practice—seen across projects for Baileys, Crown Royal, and other Diageo brands—has consistently explored culture not merely as backdrop, but as raw material. He treats visual identity as a living interface between brands and the cultural conditions they occupy. Spritzmas wasn’t about making gin look festive—it was about staging a universe where gin became the festival.

The result was a campaign that thrived not in cohesion but in coherence. There was no single message, no traditional holiday arc. Instead, there was rhythm: a cadence of images, jokes, prompts, and cocktails that collectively asked the audience not just to consume, but to participate. That sense of authorship—decentralized, remixable, and visually elastic—wasn’t accidental. It was designed. And behind that design was Chenguang Deng.