Making a digital brand of Ballantine’s Whisky.

In 2012 Work Club won Campaign Digital Agency of the year. The work we did for Ballantine’s Whisky was a huge contributor to this. Below are a few of many weird and wonderful digital projects we created for the brand.

Ballantine’s brand platform was “Leave an impression”. tshirtOS was the digital manifestation of that. A wearable, washable, digital screen t-shirt that people could programe to express anything they like.

We created an early prototype and pushed that into a limited run product that was fully washable, easy to wear and connect. We worked with local markets all over the world to get the tshirt on celebrities, TV personalities, at music events and in content.

We also created a promo film – a sort of movie trailer – to show what it could do.

One of the most exciting and innovative project we did was the Ballantine’s Space Glass. A whisky tumblr developed with engineers who understood microgravity.

It used surface tension to send whisky up and through capillaries in the glass because gravity meant it couldn’t be poured. It had specially placed airholes near the surface to ensure there was still an olfactory experience. It had a filling mechanism so liquid could be easily poured in zero g.

We created a wide ranging PR outreach, where different parts of the design story were separated and kept as exclusives for different publications, depending on where their interests lay. For some it was the specific design story. For others it was about futuristic technology. Or for some, it was about the whisky itself. We blended a batch of Ballantine’s Whisky specifically designed to taste good in microgravity, which can dull tastebuds.

We even tested it in zero G, using something called a “drop test” at something called a ZARM drop tower in Bremen.

When we launched Ballantine’s on social, we created an editorial publication called “Instazine”. A heavy deep-linked series of Instagram profiles that for the viewer, simply made for much richer content. Each image or comment was an entire article, editorially conceived with contributors, illustrations, photography and links to other topics.

There’s a Whisky emoji on your phone. That’s there because we lobbied the Unicode Consortium to make one for Ballantine’s Whisky. It didn’t exist before, and it only exists now because we spent 6 months properly building a case for its inclusion.