Frontlines: Breaking the Ice

TV viewers can expect a jolt of life during ad breaks in the coming weeks as Jägermeister’s new surfing-themed campaign threatens to burst right through their screens.

A bold, vibrant vision, the multimillion-euro ‘It Runs Deep’ project was created totally au naturel, with an emphasis on capturing natural bonding and connections between people. The script went out the window, leaving only a loose storyboard idea: grab a bunch of surfers, head to Iceland and catch the waves. Though the Jägermeister team scoured the globe looking for the right faces and skills, their efforts initially proved fruitless. Enter Bundoran surfing pro Richie Fitzgerald, who turned their attention to the litany of surfing talent found in the UK and Ireland. Sufficiently impressed, Jägermeister snapped up Fitzgerald, fellow Irish boarder David Blunt and three of Britain’s finest. Next stop: the wild climes of Iceland, where only the best of the best could hope to make an impression...

With the Jägermeister Freezer Sessions packing out venues nationwide over the last number of years, Irish music fans will be familiar with the Jägermeister perfect serve – the ice cold shot. And for Richie, the 10-day road trip was all about ‘ice cold’. “It really is the polar opposite of what you’d imagine the perfect surfing destination to be!” laughs Richie. “I thought it was a cool idea, to take something associated with warmer climes and make it crazy and dynamic. And I think British and Irish guys have thicker skin, which helped achieve the kind of effect they were looking for. It’s about a journey, and it really felt like one in the end.”

Alongside wife Briohny, Richie runs Surfworld surf school and shop in Bundoran, a far cry from the treacherous conditions awaiting the crew in Scandinavia. Despite competing professionally all over the world since 1984, this was entirely new territory.

“I had never even been to Iceland before”, he admits. “I always thought I’d never travel to anywhere colder than Ireland if I could help it. You want palm trees and board shorts in the middle of January, not ice! When you get on the road in Iceland, it’s fjords and snow-capped mountains and glacial areas and ice lagoons. It might not feel like a surfing destination but the waves are fantastic - very rough. Luckily, we had a great production team - Pegasus Productions, who look after Game of Thrones - who knew what they were doing.”

They certainly did. Soundtracked by Fightstar (the thinking man’s Busted), the promo expertly captures the boys’ high-octane adventures. They make it look easy. Be honest. It’s terrifying, right?

“I’ve done a lot of big wave surfing over the years and I think that’s why they hired us,” says Richie. “It’s not arrogance, but professionalism. Whatever the production team or nature threw at us, we’d have the skills to back it up. At least, that was the idea! It did feel, at times, geographically, like we were about to fall off the edge of the cliff like old explorers going out into the ocean. Everywhere you look, there’s white mountains with steaming geysers coming out of them, zero-degree water, minus 25 degrees in other places. Pretty hardcore. But that’s why they cast good surfers instead of actors or models!”