Johnnie Walker achieve supercharged awareness and engagement

Johnnie Walker partnered with Vamp to raise awareness and showcase the Black Label Sherry Finish highball in Malaysia.
three friends cheersing their drinks

Johnnie Walker worked with a diverse set of 12 Vamp creators to focus promotion on a singular product, aiming to drive awareness and engagement.

Vamp then re-formatted the content into ads, and amplified these with a paid media strategy for hyper-local targeting.

The brief 

To showcase the product, Vamp creators were briefed to produce content that showed Johnnie Walker Black Sherry Highball being used to create moments to enjoy with friends. They wanted bright and vibrant content calling out the smooth, smoky, and sweet taste of the Black Label Sherry Finish.

The strategy

12 Vamp creators were briefed to create a diverse set of assets and interpret the brief to create engaging product material. Johnnie Walker recognised that using local creators from the target market would make the content more relatable, engaging micro creators for higher engagement. This was effective when the content was re-used as targeted paid ads to drive further consideration among the targeted audience. 

Keeping a consistent theme across the content, meant the overall messaging was reinforced across the different creative asset formats. By briefing the creators to show the creation of the Highball before enjoying the drink with friends, an amount of connectedness was presented across different creator outputs. 

bottle of johnnie walker whisky

The outcomes

The approach of applying consistent messaging and using the high-performing organic content on paid channels, led to impressive results across their key success metrics of building awareness and engagement.

The real magic happened with the paid performance, where the engagement rate was a staggering 29X higher than the social platform’s benchmark.

The learnings 

1) Keep it local 

Going for a localised approach can often be a great route forward, even if your brand is global. The temptation can often be to use creators with a global reach knowing your eCommerce store is accessible 24-hours a day, no matter where users exist. However, the relatable nature of localised content helps consumers imagine themselves purchasing and using your product.

2) Bigger isn’t always better

Going for a more localized approach to their campaign meant the majority of the creators selected by Johnnie Walker had less than 100k followers. However, micro influencers have been proven to have far higher engagement rates, and as this campaign showed, this can lead to similarly impressive reach. 

3) Good organic = good paid 

Applying paid media boosting to the best performing paid content and using localised targeting, really brings everything together. The added bonus was Vamp handling this process for the client through the platform, allowing the Johnnie Walker team to focus on supporting their business while Vamp drove additional campaign value.

Download the free Vamp guide and learn how your brand can succeed on the original influencer marketing platform, Instagram.

Download this free Vamp guide and learn how to succeed on the world’s most viral platform.