Ballantine’s has had huge success over the past decade by connecting with consumers via their passions. Namely through their True Music platform. But, with the goal of becoming the #1 Premium Scotch Whisky globally now within reach (Ballantine’s is currently #2), they needed to supercharge their efforts to cultivate new drinkers and drive brand love. So we set our sights on gaming. Our short term goal was to sell out our Ballantine’s Finest Moxxi’s Edition and build brand equity amongst gamers over the long term.

Our idea was to take Mad Moxxi, Borderlands' beloved NPC, and bring her out of the game by hiring her, in real life, as a Ballantine’s employee - our first Chief Galactic Expansion Officer.

Moxxi’s a known entrepreneur and, most notably for a whisky brand, a bartender herself.

Through this idea we could get across some of the brand’s messages: we tackled the incredibly important, but often overlooked, message of ‘Responsible Drinking’ and gave fans a reason to engage. We were able to expand the Borderlands universe, giving fans more of what they love through social and streaming channels. Finally, we made the most of all of Moxxi’s entrepreneurial instincts to drive Ballantine’s business - selling a LOT of whisky in a short time - all while making it clear that Ballantine’s aren’t total n00bs when it comes to gaming.

Gamers are notoriously hard to engage, so we knew we would have to tread carefully or we would just be seen as another brand entering their space with an open checkbook but without any understanding of its nuances.

Instead of throwing money at the problem, we partnered with Gearbox - the developers of the Borderlands franchise - to give fans more of what they love: Mad Moxxi.

We put together a squad of Borderlands streamers in key markets to give real Borderlands fans a taste of Moxxi like never before: with one-off gift packages, guest appearances in feeds and bespoke cocktails. On Twitter and LinkedIn, she interacted with fans and made professional ‘connections’; she did press interviews, issued fan challenges and responded personally to fan requests.

All this activity was designed to connect with Borderlands fans first, underlining our long term and ‘bottom up’ approach to building credibility in gaming.

To connect with our audience, we needed this production to stay true to the game. So we worked closely with the game’s developers and used Unreal - the same engine that the game is created with - to share environments, characters, textures and animations between the game and our marketing.

Once our bar environment was built we reused it to create reactive content and paired Moxxi's character model with facial data collected during VO sessions with Moxxi's voice actor, to create quick-turn CG content in days versus weeks.

We focused primarily on Twitter and LinkedIn to engage directly with fans in real time, while our global streamer squad worked across Twitch and YouTube to react to and amplify video content.

Over the course of the campaign, we created over 300 assets: from a PSA film around Responsible Drinking, to streamer guest appearances, in-feed challenges and individual social posts and comments.

We sold out of the entire 100,000 bottle global inventory of Moxxi’s whisky.

We reached 40m new fans and had 1.2m social engagements.

62% of those reached changed their minds positively towards Ballantine’s.

83% saw Moxxi as a good or very good spokesperson.

405 pieces of press coverage around the world.

We saw a 101% lift in site traffic with a 30% increase in dwell time on-site.

Traffic from bottle sales even crashed Amazon in Spain.

Most importantly we connected with gamers on their level: staying true to Moxxi’s character, adding new layers to a world they love and, in doing so, driving positive perceptions of Ballantine’s among this important new audience.