
World Class
Helping people care about what, where, & how they drink in the same way they do about food.
Diageo’s World Class portfolio had already established itself as a valued pillar of support amongst the world’s best bartenders. We helped them realise the value of investing in those on the other side of the bar too.



Challenge & Insight
Diageo wanted to increase awareness & drive sales of their Reserve spirits brands globally.
We discovered that 90% of people would send their meal back at a restaurant, but only 10% would send a drink back to the bar if they weren’t happy with it. There was a knowledge gap that resulted in a lack of confidence with cocktails.

Opportunity & Solution
Inspiring people to care more about their drinks & educating them on where & how they can elevate their drinks experiences.
We established World Class as a mark of quality & developed the Make It World Class platform as a call to action – challenging people to expect more from their drinks experiences & making it easy for them by showing up where they’re already spending time.
We engaged World Class’s passionate community of the world’s best bartenders & established them as the trusted authorities – celebrating their craft & increasing people’s appreciation of it as a result.
We had watched foodie culture go mainstream; appreciation of quality food exploded & chefs turned into celebrities. We realised World Class had an opportunity to help cocktail culture follow the same path.
Nick Hoskin, Executive Creative Director

Art Direction
We developed an aesthetic that was consistent enough to be recognisable while ensuring the portfolio brands were always the heroes.
We moved away from the highly re-touched world of traditional drinks advertising & adopted an aspirational & accessible ‘perfectly imperfect’ aesthetic – making the content more relatable for the audience.





Content Creation
A broad range of content to inspire, entertain & educate.
We demonstrated World Class’ relevance to their audience by aligning with their key interests of travel, food & entertainment & created a rich mix of assets for owned, earned & paid media channels.
Reinventing the Comms Campaign
A global journey to discover the ultimate drinks experiences. An eight-part TV series hosted by the world’s best bartenders, giving an insider’s view on what, where & how to drink better in their city. This is World Class List.
Watch the full series on Amazon Prime or iTunes
A long-form content series enabled us to reach new audiences, deliver ’time spent with brand’ metrics (that went far beyond what could be expected with a TVC) & progress cocktail culture as a result.
Our partnership with Amazon enabled us to ensure viewers were never more than two-clicks away from a point of purchase.
We also created a wealth of supporting content that was optimised to be easily re-purposed by partners & local markets, enabling World Class to deliver a fully-integrated global comms campaigns.

Event Brand Identity
A celebration of local culture for the biggest event in the World Class calendar.
To celebrate the 10th annual competition to crown the world’s best bartender (World Class Global Final) in Berlin we developed a Bauhaus-inspired identity – activated by local markets globally, & featured heavily across Berlin during the event.
CoLab
Identifying & collaborating with the Cultural Curators – those who influence people on the drinking side of the bar.
Through our CoLab offering we identified, engaged & activated the key people, brands, publishers & events — collaborating to curate, create & amplify relevant content to their audiences.
Social
Being on the channels where the audience spend time & creating content that’s proven to drive engagement.
We used the World Class social channels to share our aspirational & accessible content, actively engaging with our existing audience, & other relevant social channels to recruit new followers.


Digital
Creating destinations for people to discover more & making it easy for them to purchase.
We created two digital content hubs, one for bartenders & another aimed at consumers with a lifestyle focus. The sites consolidate all World Class content & act as a destination for people to visit after engaging with our content elsewhere & enable them to easily purchase Reserve portfolio products.

The Impact
Return on ad spend for World Class List – a new benchmark for Diageo.
Monthly engagements on owned social channels.
Sales increase during World Class List campaign. 70.4% of which were ‘new to brand’.
Organic growth for the Reserve portfolio since we started working with World Class.
World Class content is best in class in the industry. This is the first time I have seen really good, quality content through to commerce across Amazon globally.
Anthony Reeves, Global Executive Creative Director of Amazon Media Group



Our Role
Strategy | Creative | Art Direction | Editorial & Content Production | Tech Development
Cultural Curator Identification | Content Co-creation
SMARTS | Wildebeest | TBA | Precious | Addie Chinn | Sweet & Chilli