Johnnie Walker is striding into the metaverse
Still innovating 200 years after launching the most famous bottle in the world.
How do you connect a Southeast Asian, digitally native audience with a 200-year-old Scottish whisky brand? Take them beyond the limits of reality by delivering a first-of-its-kind immersive music experience, positioning the brand to be seen as a cultural pioneer.
Together with Diageo, Hypebeast and Bristol-based start-up Condense, Deloitte co-created the design and delivery of a simultaneous, live, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) concert in the metaverse. The concert embodied the brand’s attitude of positivity and progress for their ‘Walk Beyond’ campaign, which delivers culture-defining moments to captivate creative communities, making Johnnie Walker relevant for a new generation of changemakers in the Philippines.
We are all about being bold; culturally and collectively progressive. We want to be at the forefront of technology, and as a brand, we want to be where our target consumers are playing.
Celine Ong JL, Head of Culture & Partnerships Southeast Asia, Diageo
Why did Johnnie Walker need to be brave?
Virtual concerts aren’t new, but simultaneous VR and AR, 360° video, and cross-continental live streamed concerts are. To pioneer this new experience, the Johnnie Walker team had to get comfortable with uncertainty. Their commitment to creating truly innovative experiences for consumers meant we needed to build brand new technology.
While strategic goals were set from the start, everything else had to evolve as we went, working together in agile sprints. We brought in emerging Bristol-based tech start-up, Condense, because of their market-leading metaverse technologies, which helped Johnnie Walker push the boundaries in terms of brand expression and investing in cutting-edge technical innovation.
The Johnnie Walker team's commitment to creating truly innovative experiences for consumers meant we needed to build brand new technology.
So, what did it take to do something that’s never been done before?
Innovation strategy and ideation, build and launch, on-the-day logistics and bottle delivery. End-to-end capabilities, with the energy of a start-up, and the connections of our broader organisation backing us up. We went all-in with Johnnie Walker to:
- Bring together strategy, deep tech, customer experience and marketing experts to ensure meaningful impact from this first-of-its-kind experience.
- Discover metaverse technology start-ups through our tech ecosystem and connect Johnnie Walker with Condense to help deliver the concert with their unique 3D video streaming technology.
- Co-develop new tech with Condense because what we needed to deliver didn’t exist yet. We built a bespoke AR web app to deliver the concert to customers across the Philippines. We built and operated a rapid iterative development process to get there in time.
What was the impact?
The concert, starring Filipino pop sensation James Reid, streamed live from Bristol to an audience in the Philippines, delivering a VR experience to competition winners, and a simultaneous AR experience via the custom-built app. The campaign also helped Johnnie Walker achieve a share of voice of over 80% of the whiskey market in the Philippines for the first time in a year and a half.
Collectively, we have delivered a scalable, leading-edge customer experience that can now be replicated and developed across Southeast Asia and beyond. This gives Johnnie Walker an experiential expression of their culturally pioneering identity and allows them to connect with new audiences, where they play, in a new way.
