Diageo Reserve is a luxury portfolio that includes Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Cîroc, Don Julio, Tanqueray No. TEN, Ketel One, Zacapa, and curated Single Malts.

Diageo first launched World Class in 2009 to connect its luxury brands with the industry in ways traditional marketing could not. Since then, numerous competitors have launched their own versions including Campari Red Hands (2013), Chivas Masters (2014), Patron Perfectionists (2015), Glenfiddich World’s Most Experimental (2016), and Italicus Art of Aperitivo (2017). While Diageo was undoubtedly the pioneer, it needed to remain the premiere competition in an increasingly competitive space.

Our objective was to cement Diageo Reserve brands’ place at the heart of global cocktail culture by making this our biggest World Class yet.

To achieve that ambitious goal, we sought to beat all key metrics versus the year prior including earned media placements, earned brand mentions, earned media reach, and average social engagement rate.

Since its inception in 2009, the bartending competition had been the heart and soul of World Class and the accompanying cocktail festival came second. But although it was undoubtedly important, the bartending competition was the part of World Class that had become commoditized by copycat brands.

So rather than lead with the bartending competition, our idea was to flip it all on its head and take a festival-first approach instead. It was a risky approach given the importance and 13-year history of the bartending competition. But it paid off. With festival-first as our north star, we were able to widen the aperture and the appeal of World Class like never before.

Our audience included two core segments – (1) customers and (2) legal drinking age consumers.

Our customer audience included three groups – bartenders, bars, and influencers/thought leaders. At its core, World Class is a trade advocacy program that provides bars and bartenders with access to education, inspiration, and a global network to build their reputation. Specifically, we invited a total of 1,112 guests from the trade as well as our finalists for World Class Bartender of the Year, representing 54 countries.

Our consumer audience includes legal drinking age influencers and consumers who care about what, where and how they drink, and seek to discover the best of cocktail culture. Our festival-first approach was intended to help us scale World Class to reach a wider consumer audience than ever before.

Diageo World Class commenced on Sunday, September 24th and concluded one week later on Saturday, September 30th. We held a Welcome Event Monday evening at the stunning Selvagem restaurant in the heart of the iconic Parque Ibirapuera – the most visited park in South America.

With a festival-first mindset, we held 52 unique brand experiences over the week including an immersive experience for each Diageo Reserve Brand.

Before arriving in São Paulo, our 54 “World Class Bartender of the Year” finalists had already knocked out an impressive 10,000 competitors in regional competitions. After three days of intense live challenges, we crowned Jacob Martin of Canada as the winner.

For the first time ever, we also held an Industry Forum with sessions on relevant industry topics.

We focused the last three days on the Local Cocktail Festival with brand experiences in 2,000+ venues across São Paulo and all of Brazil.

We achieved our ambitious goal of making Diageo World Class 2023 the biggest World Class ever and cementing Diageo Reserve brands’ place at the heart of cocktail culture. Our festival-first approach solidified World Class as not only the premiere cocktail competition in the world, but also the premier event for the cocktail community.

Our festival-first mindset led us to a consumer and customer-led publishing strategy where everyone associated with World Class was activated as a publishing channel. As a result, we exceeded all of our benchmarks.

Specifically, we generated 3,288 earned media articles (vs. 1,900 year prior), 99% of earned with a brand mention (vs. 91% year prior), 6.1 billion earned media reach (vs. 2.35 billion year prior), and a 20.24% organic Instagram engagement rate (vs. 2.04% year prior) – setting the bar for World Class 2024 extremely high.