Seagram’s Xclamat!on Mixers’ launch campaign sparks buzz by making “!” disappear from keypads

Anyone who has ever typed a message knows how a missing “!” on the keyboard can throw everything off. A greeting feels incomplete, a reaction loses its tone, and a sentence suddenly reads very differently. That tiny shift in expression was the starting point for Seagram’s Xclamat!on Mixers, who chose to play with this everyday habit to spark a larger conversation online.

The brand rolled out a digital disruption by removing the “!” punctuation from Bobble AI keyboards for two days, impacting millions of users of the keyboard app, who suddenly found their texts sounding unusually flat. With Bobble AI’s large user base, the absence quickly became noticeable, as morning greetings and casual chats dropped their usual tone.

Creators such as Kusha Kapila, Rahul Dua, Srishti Dixit, Tanmay Singh (Scout) and Mohak Narang amplified the buzz with hilarious posts reacting to the missing symbol. The situationsnowballed into a wider conversation and #AddXclamat!onToLife climbed to the No. 1 trend on X.com India.

Two days later, the “!” reappeared across keyboards, marking the moment the brand revealed the idea behind the stunt and tied it back to the central theme of exploring how expression shifts withthis single symbol. By closing the loop this way, the campaign showed how a minor punctuation tweak could alter how people communicate, turning a small digital interruption into a wider cultural moment.

The marketing team at Pernod Ricard India along with Ogilvy, WPP Media, Bobble AI and Blink worked together to shape the activation, using a simple behavioural nudge to make users experience the absence before understanding its purpose. The approach relied on letting audiences discover the disruption organically, then allowing the online conversation to build.

The shift from confusion to clarity helped the idea travel naturally across user communities, creators and social feeds, reinforcing how seamlessly the stunt blended into everyday digital behaviour.

By taking away something as small as the “!” from everyday messages, the campaign made people notice how much we rely on little things to express ourselves. Additionally, it showed us how even the tiniest part of daily texting can spark reflection, conversation, and shared experience, turning a simple disruption into a story that everyone could feel.

Conceptualised by: Pernod Ricard India. Brand team – Debasree Dasgupta, Joydeep Basuroy, Tanvi Swami, Anandini Arora. Media & content team – Pierre De Greef, Shwetha Nair, Siddhartha Virkar,Chandini Malla, Bhavika Manchanda, Ankit Prasad, Lovely Kukreja, Vikrant Awasthi, Kamal Matharoo, Anu Aswal, Mayur Agarwal, Ogilvy India – Prakash Nair, Nitin Srivastava, Anuj Kala, Waebhav Yadav, Varun Shenoy, Tanya Khattar, Wavemaker India – Ajay Gupte, Priyambada Choudhury, Aarti Bal, Abhishek Gupta, Navya Arora, Vaibhav Pankaj, Twameka Kumar, Sahejpreet Kohli, Priyanka Senapati, Blink Digital – Renee Mitra, Nicole Ferraz, Dia Kirpalani, Urvi Dalmia, Saadhak Malhotra, Yogesh Shirke, Anuj Rathod, Aishwarya Kadam.