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Selling Ice to Eskimos, at Scale

A Case Study in Strategic Planning · Dusan Rula · Brooklyn, NY.

Most people treat "selling ice to Eskimos" as a metaphor. I treated it as a brief.

It took some time of on-and-off research.

Please note, I didn't make the expression up. It was there. I just picked it up, and solved it.
Here's how — and what it means to how I approach your brand.

And it's not "Selling Ice to Eskimos." It's "selling ice to indigenous peoples of the Arctic region, at scale." The respectful term is Inuit in Canada and Greenland, Yupik and Iñupiat in Alaska. I'll use Inuit here — though the campaign would work with local advisors to get naming right.

Ice in the Arctic is salty, white, and everywhere. Selling it to people who have plenty of it is a problem. Not because they're hostile towards foreigners trying to take advantage of them (and who isn't?) — but because there's no reason to buy it.

There are many kinds of ice. Many colors of white. The story goes the Indigenous peoples of that region can tell between the white of this kind and the white of that kind — because the white of this kind means storm or a polar bear, equaling death, and the white of that kind means calm weather, or just a snow hill, which means living another day. Spotting the right distinctions in a timely manner sometimes means survival — kind of like in business — not to worry you. And that's why I'm here — to point out the ice that sells and to whom. After that, almost any advertising creative can have an idea about how to sell it. Before that, fat chance.

One of these crackles, and is 800,000 years old.
The other one is just cold.
Wow, it even rhymes.

See, the Anunique has these bubbles inside of it. They've been trapped there for half a million to a million years — 800,000 on average. They are the trappings of the Earth's ancient atmosphere from that period. And not just CO₂ or O₂ or N₂ — there are other remnants from the ancient forests flourishing around the Earth at that time in there too. It is the actual air the dinosaurs were breathing in. It is a part of that ancient atmosphere, trapped inside the ice.

It's also under enormous pressure. So when that ice melts — say, in your whiskey glass — it crackles, loudly. Depending on the size of the bubble, that pop can hit up to 89 decibels.

So now imagine the parallel. These Arctic peoples barely had their own freedom. Usually others were trying to subjugate them rather than liberate.
They are not big talkers. They are survivors. For generations. For millennia.

They were carrying the pressures of the outside world inside.
Kind of like Anunique ice. They want to crackle.
With a glass of whiskey, perhaps. After a long day of work.
Staring at their favorite fireplace.

Didn't that just break the ice?
If you're a creative, are campaigns already forming in your mind?
Go back to panel 1. Think about what you thought then: selling ice to Eskimos—how ridiculously impossible that sounded.
That's probably changed now, hasn't it? The new angle completes the picture. The data was always there; the information wasn't.
But I digress. Let's return to the creative solution.

In terms of media and trends, is Anunique Ice possibly lending itself well to an ASMR audio/video campaign — that is pleasing to chilling, while reading or sleeping or something along those lines? Two hours of crackling. Each crackle releasing a million years of pressures. To stretch it even further (and i don't know if ice allows for stretching - what do you think?) I wonder how many people would log in to a live video stream, from Anthartica, that features some thin resonating cristal glasses and some ultra high end mic-eage? Tests would know, of course. The breifs are 'living breathing creatures' always open to good input, or at least they should be when done correctly. The brand might be so lux that even such live streams might work. Strategists job is to have this options and test them. So we know what's up. In any case, ASMR as a trend? Anyone? ASMR? No?

And as for the smell of the ancient atmosphere from before any human ever walked the Earth? That whiff ain't gonna be cheap, so get used to just hearing it pop through your computer or your phone — instead of tasting it from your glass. And in addition, just as a curiosity, Anunique is a freshwater ice. It's fresh and tasty. It is also very clean - purified by the colds and the pressures for thousands of years.

Then there's ASMR. Ice crackling is already a known trigger. Anunique has it built in—each crackle releasing a million years of pressure. The sound isn't the question. The audience is.

Will ice-crackling ASMR get Inuit to buy Anunique? On its own, probably not. For Inuit, ice isn't exotic. The crackle isn't a novelty. It's the sound of home. ASMR sells the unfamiliar to people far away.

That doesn't kill the idea. It clarifies it. If Anunique is positioned as a luxury export, ASMR fits: a live stream, crystal glasses, high-end mics, two hours of crackling. If it's positioned as a local celebration item, ASMR is the wrong channel. The same sound can read more lux or less. Position decides.

ASMR as a trend? Sure. But trends don't sell to everyone. They sell to the audience already listening.

If you're looking to pick a role in advertising, Creative Strategists' ability to find the "impossible" angle is the primary job requirement. Finding the strategic angle is what makes the work worth doing in the first place — for the whole agency, not just you.

To complaicate further, great creatives and great strategists usually don’t live in the same body. When they do, it isn’t magic. It's many different guiding experiences, and it’s self-awareness: knowing how you think, what you accept, when and how to switch hats, and when to shut up and listen. That’s the of lifelong training. What was that written on Apollo's temple in Delphi or someplace in Luxor: "Know thy...". What was it? In any case, the angle is just the output. The creative team does the heavy lifting. My job is to make sure they’re lifting the right thing.

Ok, ok, others add some value to it too. Ok. But just a little bit.

In terms of positioning — I didn't do profitability tests, because that's more a function of business than advertising. We're doing advertising here. So the most profitable position for such an endeavor might not be the top-shelf, high-end thing. It could be the Inuit workers celebrating their children's birth. Or a wedding. In that case the product, positioned in such a way, sounds almost like it can become a mandatory thing for the top celebrations in the Arctic. This has to come from within the brand, because, see, this ice is minned in Anthartica. It has to travel around the Earth to get to your celebration. From one white corner to the other. One polarity to another. That is what additionlly gives it it's edge. Along with the power of correct positioning, of course. In my opinion, in this age and With some work, it can enter the area of customs, if not wider then perhaps some sporadic family traditons. Families of cool kids? It can become kind of like a ballin' thing we have in the West, or like a bottle of some formula alcohol buried for 20, 30, 100 years, preserved for an offspring's wedding day; that we have in the East. If nothing, now it has a story that packs a punch. Small print: the company probably must be prominetly locally owned, to avoid getting a bad rep. ANd in addition, It would be super hard to go through the rules and regulations that they have in Antarctica, about ice exploitation. Which makes it kind of snuff too. And most likely you would need to speak Russian in order to pull it off on the bussiness side. And now that that's out of the way...

This is how I work. I take the brief and research until I find the angle. Not every brief is "sell ice to the Arctic." But every brief has an angle that makes the work worth doing — for the client, for the agency, for the audience. That's what I find. If you have a brief that needs that bit of an extra that sparks, or if you need a new brief all together, with executions for almost any audience imaginable - or without, talk to me. Our prices are wildly affordable.

— Dusan Rula

Just a side note. At one point, Crispin started hiring anthropologists to do market research. They came back with some weird shi7 about humans and businesses. It made CP+B the most creative advertising agency on Earth 4 years in a row. (Obviously only one among other things; but if I had to pick one thing why, and it's never only a one thing... it would be, 'out of the box inputs they received through hiring'.)

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Dusan Rula · Brooklyn · 2026

Words by Dusan Rula, Brooklyn, NY. Written 2026. Contact: dusan.rula@gmail.com

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Selling Ice to Eskimos, at Scale