The whisky category had a knowledge problem. Not a lack of it, an excess. The connoisseurs, the tasting notes, the heritage narratives, the implied requirement to understand something before you were allowed to enjoy it. Glenmorangie’s master distiller Dr Bill Lumsden had a different view: “There’s nothing to understand. It’s just delicious.” That sentence became the entire creative brief.
This was an anti-knowledge bully campaign. A colourful invitation to a Technicolor world where you don’t need to know anything, and you don’t need to pretend. Working with photographer and director Miles Aldridge, we replaced the somber, smoky grammar of whisky advertising with saturated scenes where the drink shows up in laundromats, train journeys and bubble baths. We hid anagrams of Glenmorangie on neon signs, planted recurring giraffes as brand cameos. Every frame is a visual game, an invitation rather than an instruction. The Drum called it “a delightfully unexpected technicolour dream.”
Adweek covered the platform as a benchmark for making a flagship single malt genuinely accessible to audiences who had never considered themselves whisky drinkers. Caspar Macrae, Glenmorangie’s Global Marketing and Business Director: “We’re so delighted with the impact of the campaign so far, and how wonderfully it has reflected our brand and our whisky, that we wanted to extend it further.”
Chapter II launched in November 2022, with larger sets and wilder conceits. Muse by Clio described it as “a pupils-dilating antidote” to category convention. Under the platform’s lifespan, Glenmorangie doubled its profits and charted record sales between 2018 and 2023.
Profits at Glenmorangie doubled and the brand set new sales records across the campaign’s lifespan, with unprecedented commercial success on a global scale.
