The holiday season marks the busiest time of the year for bourbon with 33% of the entire year’s bourbon volume hitting in Q4 driven by holiday festivities and merrymaking. However, 21+ millennials these days are actually drinking less – reaching for more premium spirits and cocktails in the pursuit of quality and character. And with cocktail culture on the rise, our consumer often opts for an Old Fashioned – abdicating their bourbon of choice to bartenders.

Our objective was not to simply get them to put Maker’s on their consideration list. We needed to make them proud to call us by name – even when ordering a classic cocktail – by taking back our rightful place in holiday merrymaking.

The idea: utilize the sounds and artistry of cocktail mixing and nostalgic merrymaking to position the Maker’s Mark Old Fashioned as the catalyst for memorable holiday moments with friends.

Music – much like cocktails – brings people together around the holidays. So, what better way is there to celebrate the Old Fashioned than to pair it with a classic holiday song? To celebrate the Old Fashioned and memorable moments with friends, we identified “Auld Lang Syne,” a song about traditions and cherishing days gone by.

However, because our millennials demand experiences in which they can play a central role, we knew a traditional cocktail ad would fall flat. So instead, we invited them to experience a nostalgic Maker’s holiday moment for themselves by inviting them to the party.

Leveraging YouTube’s Magic Window 180-degree video technology, we created a first-of-its-kind interactive VR music video. Through a perfect rendition of the human peripheral, consumers experienced the performance by guiding their mobile devices. The more they panned, the more hidden characters they discovered, making the video more memorable and shareable.

We enlisted Kurt Hugo Schneider, known for using everyday items to remix iconic musical covers and create choreography on Youtube. Inspired by the sounds of cocktail mixing (a clinking glass, the twisting sound of the swizzle spoon, a shake of bitters, whisky pouring, expressing the orange and spearing the cherry along with ambient holiday merrymaking), Kurt laid down the sounds while Will Champlin played guitar and sang the lyrics to “Auld Lang Syne,” finally culminating in a full-fledged bar sing-along around a grand piano.

Launching exclusively on Youtube, we leveraged Kurt Hugo Schneider’s subscriber base and skippable pre-roll as well as Google search to target those seeking to discover holiday songs and time-classic cocktail recipes, interests which only increase in volume in December.

To build intrigue, we also sent influential food and drink editors traditional piano sheet music with our rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Instead of overlooking us at the bar, our consumer actively engaged with the brand:

• In fact, we saw a 29.1% increase in Maker’s Mark Bourbon searches YoY, indicating an increase in “share of mind” for Maker’s during a key holiday timeframe while also experiencing a 1.4% lift in ad recall.

• And the Magic Window technology drove strong user engagement and view time, as it allowed the music video to be truly interactive with an average view time of 1:30 despite an accessible “skip” button throughout – a 34% higher video completion rate vs. a year ago.

• The “Maker’s Mark 180-degree Old Fashioned” was not only a media first, it also outperformed our previously tested holiday brand campaigns in both engagement and cost efficiency.