Magnum Ice Cream Offers a Surreal Taste of Summer in These Supremely Cool Posters

Magnum ice cream bars will be popping up outdoors this summer. But they won’t melt, even in the blazing sun.

LOLA MullenLowe commissioned American artist Brendan Monroe to create monochrome posters and murals. His surrealist bent and penchant for blobby shapes suits the brand’s aesthetic. 

Naturally, Monroe’s work for Magnum features stylized ice-cream bars as its central motif. In each execution, they flow and coalesce into playful, often summer-y manifestations of the brand’s “True to pleasure” ethos. (Talk about soft serve!) 

Here’s a kicky 22-foot-high mural in central London’s Shoreditch district:

“The ice-cream shape is less distinct when you’re closer up. It makes you want to take a step back, see the bigger picture and then be pleasantly surprised with solving the visual puzzle,” LOLA Mullen creative chief Tomás Ostiglia tells Muse. 

Those legs from the mural cross over to posters:

This hat-and-shades number is equally … chill: 

In this next ad, are those waves or Magnum bars? They’re both!

Oh, hey—grab a napkin, you’ve got ice cream all over your face:

Finally, Magnum’s “pleasure” proposition does a body good: 

“The natural media space for the ice cream category is outdoors in the summer, but we wanted to break with the norm and create art where the appetite appeal of the product is more suggestive,” Ostiglia says. 

Monroe’s work fits perfectly, he adds. 

“It is elegant and sophisticated, and the iconic ice-cream shape is so seamlessly integrated,” Ostiglia says. “Last year, we worked with Thomas Danthony, whose style was more art deco and colorful. With Brendan, we were drawn to his abstract style, the simplicity of black and white with the complexity of shadows and volumes.”

Hundreds of posters will appear around London in coming weeks, and roll-outs in the U.S. and Australia are planned.

“For the past several years we have been creating a portfolio of work for Magnum that is more meaningful and high quality than what you’d expect from the category,” Ostiglia says. “We’ve portrayed a range of brave, artistic people who are true to themselves, which is what we try to reflect in our campaigns. We’ve worked with drag queens, iconoclasts like Iris Apfel, visual artists, sculptors and musicians. The brand accompanies them and shines a light on them, to make the point that pleasure can have many different meanings and layers.”

Along with Magnum (which even spoon-fed us this Game of Thrones homage), other ice-cream brands raising the bar include Halo Top and Pantera Fresca’s Bittersweet Collection.

CREDITS

Agency: LOLA MullenLowe
Client: Magnum
Campaign: Pleasure Icon
Global Vice President, Unilever: Julien Barraux
Global Brand Director, Magnum: Ben Curtis
Chief Creative Officer: Chacho Puebla
Executive Creative Director: Tomás Ostiglia, Pancho Cassis
Creative Director: Saulo Rocha, André Toledo
Head of Art: Fabio Brigido
Head of Social: Fred Bosch
Copywriter: Luis Giraldo
Art Director: Camilo Jiménez, Felipe Antonioli
Global Brand Director: Tom Elliston
Account Manager: Oscar Fernandez-Baca
Producer: Felipe Calviño, Diego Baltazar
Illustrator: Brendan Monroe
Mural Production: High Rise Murals / Kinetic Active