The challenge
Highland Park’s 225th anniversary created a natural moment to tell the story of the brand, but heritage alone was unlikely to expand its audience.
Dates, craftsmanship and generations of whisky-making carry weight with existing enthusiasts. The opportunity was to make that history interesting to people with less connection to the category.
Highland Park needed an anniversary campaign that could respect 225 years of provenance while giving new audiences a more immediate reason to engage with the brand. The answer was already embedded in the whisky itself.
Highland Park is inseparable from Orkney: its landscape, climate and heather peat all contribute to the character of the liquid. That gave the campaign a story with much greater range than a conventional retrospective of the distillery.
Our solution
We made Orkney the centre of the story.
Orkney Stories was built around the landscape, people and culture behind Highland Park, connecting the character of the whisky to the place that produces it.
Filmed on location with Scottish production company LS Productions, the short film treated the islands as a subject in their own right. The landscape, including the heather peat that contributes to Highland Park’s distinctive sweet, smoky character, gave the brand’s heritage a physical and contemporary expression.
A recognisable whisky enthusiast helped lead audiences through that story, bringing an accessible point of entry to a film designed to work beyond established whisky circles.
The creative gave the anniversary a broader cultural frame. Highland Park could still talk about provenance and craft, but through a story rooted in place, character and experience. That gave the campaign enough visual and editorial interest to travel across social, paid media and earned coverage in eight key global markets.
The outcome
Orkney Stories generated 1.5 million organic impressions and one million views across eight key global markets. Instagram engagement reached 7.60%, more than twice Highland Park’s monthly average, showing unusually strong audience response to the campaign content. Paid activity delivered more than 47 million impressions, finishing 38% above target.
The campaign also secured coverage in Elle and GQ, extending Highland Park’s presence into media environments beyond the traditional whisky category and putting the brand in front of a broader lifestyle audience.
Highland Park’s 225th anniversary became a platform for introducing the brand to new audiences without losing the provenance that made the milestone significant in the first place.
The result was a campaign with global scale and wider cultural reach: 47 million-plus paid impressions, strong organic engagement and a 225-year-old whisky story presented in a way that gave new audiences a reason to enter it.
