Friedrich Liechtenstein’s Supermarket

At some point in the mid-2010s, EDEKA—a German supermarket cooperative that sells yogurt and dishwasher tablets like every other supermarket cooperative—started making ads that people actually wanted to watch. Not "good for an ad" watchable. Just watchable, on their own terms, the way a short film is watchable.

The Supergeil video came first and hit hardest. Friedrich Liechtenstein—German actor, musician, a man whose face looks like it was designed by someone who finds faces genuinely interesting—drifts through an EDEKA store to an electro track built around the word "supergeil," which translates somewhere between "super horny" and "super awesome" depending on context and company. The ad is deadpan, mildly deranged, and almost completely unexplainable, which is probably why it worked. The Kassensymphonie followed: a checkout counter turned into a percussion instrument, a timed piece of music assembled from barcodes and conveyor belt sounds. Again, completely unnecessary. Again, genuinely good.

The latest entry—Dorfdrift, about a farmer throwing his tractor through village corners at speed to deliver freshly harvested apples to the nearest store as fast as possible—continues the tradition of finding an oblique visual metaphor for something earnest. The actual message is about short supply chains and regional sourcing, which is the kind of thing that appears in sustainability reports and vanishes from memory immediately. The drift sequence doesn’t vanish. A weathered man sliding a tractor around bends, apples shaking in the flatbed, some local grandmother presumably diving for cover—it’s dumb and precise and more interesting than it needs to be.

Whoever at EDEKA’s agency keeps greenlighting this stuff clearly understands something most brand strategists don’t: that if the content is actually good, people will watch it without being told to. This sounds obvious until you look at ninety-five percent of branded content and realize nobody got the memo.