Seagram’s 7 is an unpretentious whiskey that had been lost in a culture of craft spirits and complicated cocktails. After a long span without much advertising support, this former icon lacked a voice and cultural relevance.

Our challenge with the re-launch was to bring the brand back to relevance, with a new tone of voice and look and feel, and give it a new platform that would resonate with its current Gen X audience as well as a new generation of drinkers. Outside of Seagram’s 7’s smoothness, we didn’t have a deep product story to tell, so we trained our storytelling approach on the sensibilities of the type of drinker Seagram’s 7 seeks out and the bars where its sold.

We set out to increase social engagement, audience and drive consideration and sales of Seagram’s 7.

“This Is Your Whiskey” is a celebration of the honest, genuine moments that happen with Seagram’s 7. It’s a platform designed to extend from online video and TV through out of home and social, with a focus on Instagram and Facebook. Regardless of the channel, the campaign’s star is the dive bar, a brand world as unpretentious and straightforward as Seagram’s 7 and its audience.

In social media, we used as our foil the craft stories told by whiskey brands--all about charcoal, mellowing, barrels, or water from a very specific place. We modeled the new Seagram’s 7 voice not on a distillery tour guide but on a dive bar bartender: authentic, genuine, true, pithy, clever, with a touch of humor. We developed executional formats that feel at home in the dive bar, delivering headlines on an old bar sign, creating an advice-giving moose head and capturing real dive-bar moments.

The Seagram’s 7 drinker is predominantly 35+ and white, with a slight male skew, solidly middle class and living in the South and Midwest. Most live in states that voted for Trump. They are practical, religious, and conservative. Some feel disillusioned and disenfranchised – left behind in the wake of globalization. Often, they define themselves by what they are not – Coastal Elites

It’s a tricky audience to persuade without pandering, but we sidestepped sensitivities by focusing on the drinking occasion and things that make Seagram’s 7 appealing to this audience: its value and smoothness.

We used Simmons and the social listening tool NetBase to find shared affinities and areas of overlap between current Seagram’s 7 drinkers and a new generation. The work was conceived and produced for Instagram and Facebook, where cost-platform buys allowed us to reach both current and target consumers efficiently.

We developed an always-on social calendar that came out of a new brand platform, “This Is Your Whiskey.” We took the look and feel and tone of voice and developed scalable, replicable, and cost-effective social media-friendly executional concepts that allowed us to achieve a variety of goals, from brand storytelling to taking advantage of cultural moments, to delivering product information.

From initial concept development to production and launch of the social program, it was approximately three months.

The social content is both organic and paid, living mainly on Instagram and Facebook.

“This is Your Whiskey” has helped to put the Seagram’s 7 brand back on the map, delivering big results despite a small spend.

Both engagement and follower count more than doubled since the campaign launch, creating sharp gains in audience despite minimal media support. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the campaign is cutting through, delivering on messaging goals of authenticity.

Here’s a sample comment:

“If you’d had enough hipster bullshit and designer whiskey pretending to be old-timey, this is the drink for you.”

Within the Diageo portfolio, Seagram's 7 was the number-two performer on paid social on both effectiveness and productivity, leading the way across the portfolio in equivalized sales.