2012 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

Johnnie Walker decided to continue the success of last year’s campaign by featuring Nadine Labaki, a multi award-winning Lebanese director whose successful movies put Lebanon on the international map. The Keep Walking Lebanon cause achieved excessive mileage not only because of Nadine’s success in the local film industry, but also because she is the first woman ever to represent Johnnie Walker as an aspirational role model, creating a huge impact for the brand. Therefore, the identity of our role model was the best-kept secret in the industry and wasn’t revealed until the day of the campaign launch. Nadine Labaki was announced as the new face of Johnnie Walker during a lavish launch event with VIPs, key media influencers and bloggers, during which the campaign TVC was revealed. The hype drove the online media to instantly create buzz around the identity of our role model that same night. Online, a microsite ran 3 film podcasts featuring inspiring stories from Nadine’s career, allowing people to engage in conversation on how they “Keep Lebanon Walking”, while the Johnnie Walker Lebanon Facebook page mirrored the interactions on the microsite. The campaign also ran in Print, and Outdoor and garnered massive PR and media interest.

The Brief

One of the biggest issues in Lebanese society is the ever-present need for the upcoming generation to emigrate, with our core audience (young Lebanese 25 – 45 years old) believing that the best way to advance one’s career and make a name for oneself is to leave Lebanon. We wanted to inspire the Lebanese to believe in themselves by sharing an inspirational story of a great Lebanese achiever who faced and surmounted overwhelming odds along their journey to success.

Results

On the day of launch, right after Nadine Labaki was announced as the new talent and before she was even done with her speech, Beirut Night Life – a popular Lebanese online portal – had posted the news online, which generated immense buzz. All told, the campaign received free PR worth more than $470,000 and free media worth over $1,840,000. The percentage of female interaction with the brand doubled to 49% this year versus just 24% last year. In less than 3 months, the Johnnie Walker Lebanon Facebook page reached 1,629,575 people in a country with a Facebook population of just over 1.4 million, giving our message and our campaign significant online traction. In terms of growth, market share by volume for the Johnnie Walker brand grew from an already dominant 60.7% to an impressive 64.5% in a declining market.

Execution

Because we had a phenomenally inspiring achiever as our new role model and because we knew how revolutionary a step this was for Johnnie Walker, we decided to keep the identity of Nadine a secret from the very beginning in order to build enormous hype. Then, on December 16, VIPs and key media were invited to an exquisite dinner complete with live entertainment and custom-made whisky cocktails, where the identity of the new role model was revealed. Twitteraties at the event instantly broke the news online, creating massive buzz that quickly spread across the country. That same night, our microsite went live with the TVC and podcasts, and the next day we heavily seeded the campaign among top bloggers and media. A week later, a TV edit was made highlighting the event and its significance, and one-on-one interviews were scheduled for the coming months.

The Situation

Since Nadine Labaki is the very first woman to be featured as a Johnnie Walker role model, we took this as an opportunity to create a huge splash in the PR and media scene. The launch event became the perfect vehicle through which to announce the new role model in front of key media representatives,VIPs, and influential bloggers and Twitter community, who then supplemented the campaign’s PR effectiveness with media circulation, online blogging, and ample word-of-mouth.

The Strategy

After revealing the identity of our new Johnnie Walker talent in the presence of key media influencers and VIPs, the campaign was heavily seeded with online bloggers, while a branded press release was circulated in the media, directing them all to our interactive microsite and encouraging them to share and discuss it in their respective forums. Just days after the event, a TV release was broadcast to highlight the key milestone that the brand is undertaking with Nadine Labaki, and one-on-one interviews between key publications and Nadine Labaki were held.