Art Meets Community With Diageo's Walkers & Co.
In this exclusive interview, Shweta Jain, Chief Business Development Officer - Luxury, Reserve & Craft, Diageo, delves into the intricacies of the spirits industry, exploring the amalgamation of tradition and innovation. Jain expounds on Diageo's strategic forays into the world of OOH advertising as part of their latest marketing endeavour. She talks about the confluence of storytelling with the very identity of the Johnnie Walker brand and much more.
Excerpts:
How does Walkers & Co. envision the outdoor billboards becoming a stage for connecting not just with a wider audience but also fostering a sense of community among the young artists and their audiences?
Walkers & Co. is a platform that we all envisaged to take the philosophy of Johnnie Walker into a community conversation, into a platform that creates the right kind of enablement conversations and acts on them. The current piece on reimagining the outdoor space as an open art gallery of unprecedented scale came from our commitment to put creators such as Aravani art project out there for the world to appreciate and cherish their art form and their story. They are creators who've represented a part of the community whose narratives have not been at the forefront and that's what Johnny Walker and Walkers & Co. have done, we put their story and their journeys out there.
Outdoor campaigns often have a powerful impact due to their physical presence. How does Walkers & Co. believe this OOH campaign will create experiential moments for the audience?
Art is something that we all find in many things. The core of this outdoor campaign is to bring a creator's expression form onto the foray. That is why I think the campaign has been much appreciated and much talked about, even by thought leaders in the past few weeks since it has been put out there.
In what ways does Walkers & Co. plan to amplify the voices of the young artists beyond the outdoor billboards? Are there additional experiential elements or collaborations in the works to extend the reach of these stories?
If you go on the Walkers & Co. page, you will see that the bigger acts we've done have been a continuous part of our Indian as well as global collaborations. We collaborated with John Legend and Raja Kumari, the anthem they created has since been loved and played millions and millions of times. We've also collaborated with the likes of Hanif Qureshi, who, in my point of view, completely democratised art with his initiatives. We even collaborated with Abhinav Mishra. I think the Walker legacy and ethos have brought many such collaborations and partnerships to the foray.
Experiential marketing often involves interactive components. Are there plans for the audience to actively engage with the outdoor campaign?
The outdoor campaign is one part of the overall immersions that we've planned and are ongoing right now. A couple of years back, we took to the skies on 31 January in Goa, where we did a huge message for ‘Keep Walking India’ with a drone show. We've just done a pop-up in Cyber Hub in Gurgaon. We are going to come up with more pop-ups where you can walk in and have a piece of Aravani's creation. We are there on YouTube where they're telling their story on how their journey kind of unfolded, how they came together to form a collaborative platform enabling other people who came from communities that were bookmarked in all kinds of wrong ways. We celebrate storytelling not just in one medium, we collaborate deeply and we make sure that the stories we want to tell, the stories of progress, the stories of collective community impacting and enabling other communities touch every aspect of the consumer's journey.
How do you intend to measure the success of this OOH campaign in terms of its impact on young artists, community engagement, and overall brand resonance?
This is a continuous journey for us. It is the true way brands that lead and shape culture play. We measure ourselves with the conversations we are having and the real act of representation and enabling that we are doing. We will continue to do that. It's not a time-bound piece. We will continue to tell those stories and we will continue to drive a platform which allows for many such creators to come to the foray and have engaging conversations with real-life platforms.
