Starbucks joins a growing list of brands deliberately making creative effort front-and-centre.

Seems I’ve stumbled into an accidental series.

Apple Music vibrated mineral oil with sound to create its new identity. Levi’s and E.L.F. built painstaking stop-motion holiday campaigns.

And then Prada went and hired veteran Disney animator John Pomeroy and a team of traditional artists to draw its new holiday world by hand.

Now Starbucks is servin’ up its own version.

For Perfect Harmony, artist Geoff McFetridge drew the campaign’s tiny musicians, coffeehouses and Christmas world by hand using Sharpies directly on Starbucks cups.

Those drawings were then animated into a 30-second film set to The Turtles’ “Happy Together.” McFetridge’s hand-drawn work folds into the outdoor campaign.

The medium is particularly à propos for Starbucks.

A Sharpie on a paper cup is a familiar bit of the brand experience.

Last year, Anomaly described that familiar handwritten line as the starting point for McFetridge’s visual world.

’Course, none of this requires hand drawing anymore.

That’s what makes it so worth talking about.

AI can create a plausible miniature Christmas world in a (virtual) heartbeat.

So Starbucks chose an artist, a pen, hundreds of physical cups and all the awesome imperfections that come with them.

Prada is making essentially the same argument. Its campaign explicitly celebrates the “human touch,” with Pomeroy saying there is value in proving handcrafted work is still alive, baby.

We spent decades using tech to polish everything to perfection and remove all evidence of effort.

Now visible effort is the goal.

When almost anyone can whip up something polished, showing how somebody really made it is a winning creative choice.

If you’d like help creating and marketing products people feel compelled to buy, the product marketing consultants at Graphos Product can help.