Johnnie Walker: 25 Years on the ‘Keep Walking’ Road
Paul Klee’s work hangs at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. His style, singular and distinctive, is encapsulated in a technique he called ‘taking a line for a walk’, whereby the hand is free of rational control, free to create new images. Heralded as a great artist even during his lifetime, Klee was highly prolific and influential, and his lectures – ‘Writings on Form and Design Theory’ – are held to be as foundational for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's ‘A Treatise on Painting’ was for the Renaissance. Like all great artists, the narrative of his singular artistic talent generates arguably as much reverence for his paintings as the artwork itself.
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In 1999, the Johnnie Walker brand was in a bit of a bind. Whisky sales were in decline globally, the category was suffering from an image problem, and market fragmentation created fragmented communication. The brand, then, had two objectives to fulfil with their next campaign: increase sales, and unify the messaging.
BBH was called on to pitch and in the process to help infuse the brand with the meaning it was then lacking. “The big question was how could we get people to re-engage with whisky and Johnnie Walker as the leading brand?,” recalls John Hegarty, one of the London-born agency’s founders. A “brilliant moment” came next where planning insight met creative execution. BBH’s Nick Kendall uncovered that whisky sold itself on the basis of celebration, like champagne, but whisky had a distinct personality and character all of its own. Its advertising showcased people – and let’s be specific here, mostly men – luxuriating in penthouses and on boats celebrating various successes. Success was then depicted materially, as a place one can definitely reach.
“Our insight was that successful people never truly arrived and that life is a constant journey. You’re always moving forward, successful people are always moving forward,” John says. “Very quickly we got from that, as you can guess, ‘Keep Walking’.”
Despite the brand’s logo being the striding man and the ‘walker’ right there in the founder’s name, no one had made the connection before. “Nobody previously made the connection and defined success in that very modern way and in doing so we unlocked an appreciation and an understanding of what Johnnie Walker stood for,” John explains.
The slogan opened up the kind of images and symbols that whisky advertising could be associated with, moving it away from expected signifiers and into a new realm where the category could shift and evolve together with consumers. “You didn't end up with very conventional whisky advertising. You ended up with advertising that was about progress – and constant progress – so you looked at that to be your vehicle to create very distinctive advertising,” adds John.
He continues: “With ‘Keep Walking’, you don’t stop. And it spoke to the aspiration of the brand, saying that it itself is not going to stop; it spoke to all elements of Johnnie Walker. Then the consumer could come in where they thought it was relevant to them, because they’re quite good at working it out.”
Another change happened for the brand in 1999. The logo, a striding dandy heading to the left, was flipped to the right so the path forward could now look as endless as the spirit of the slogan.
With ‘Keep Walking’ and the subsequent forward-facing dandy, the brand brought together all the different strands of progress that the brand’s founder John Walker infused it with from the start. There was the square rather than the round bottle (to make it easier to ship more of the bottles all over the globe); the askew placement of the label, which looked eye-catching and modern; the logo opting for a then contemporary figure of the dandy; and a general distance from anything too ‘traditionally Scottish’, giving the brand a sophisticated and global air from the very start.
“With a brand giant like Johnnie Walker, you end up thinking in decades and centuries, rather than days and months,” says global brand director Jennifer English. “So staying with an idea for a long period of time feels like the right thing to do, rather than feeling restless and constantly changing it up.”
That idea, however, has to necessarily evolve with the times and the circumstances in which it exists, allowing it to be shaped by the progress it espouses. Jennifer adds that “an idea does not endure over time by staying the same forever. You have to be able to flex with the changes in the world around you.”
“When we started,” says Jennifer, referring to the use of the slogan, “it was very much about the idea of personal progress because that was the era that it was born, in the late ‘90s.” The first spot to feature ‘Keep Walking’ was ‘The Walk’ with Harvey Keitel, centering his success and movie star persona as he states: “You either learn to overcome your fear, or spend your life in the wings.” Jennifer notes that the idea of personal progress very much permeated those early campaigns and was the lens through which ‘Keep Walking’ was first interpreted,” she explains.
The sentiment begins to evolve over the years and in 2006’s ‘Human’, the progress in question starts to expand away from the individual to encompass a more collective message. It’s also strikingly prescient in 2024 when the AI conversation is loud and continuously ever-present – in the spot, the titular android reminds humans that it’s faster, stronger, and longer-lasting than any human. “You may think I am the future but you’re wrong. You are. If I had a wish, I’d wish to be human [...] I can achieve immortality by not wearing out. You can achieve immortality simply by doing one great thing,” the android reminds us.
Though the brand has a plethora of incredible work to its name, 2009’s ‘The Man Who Walked Around The World’ is possibly the most iconic. Created by BBH and starring Robert Carlyle, it’s the longest tracking shot in advertising history with a runtime of six minutes and a monologue that traces the origins of the brand, all the while communicating how the commitment to progress has been baked into it by the founder, John Walker, himself.
Standing still is not an option so how progress shows up in society has to necessarily change. “Over time, it's become more about collective progress as people are thinking outside of themselves and more about the society around them. So being able to have a universal human truth about tomorrow being better than today and flex with culture over time means that an idea can stay fresh,” says Jennifer.
With presence in 180 countries (out of 195 recognised ones), ‘Keep Walking’ has to work hard to show up effectively across different languages and cultures. The global reach is “part of what’s kept it alive and interesting for so long,” Jennifer adds. “We think of Johnnie Walker as an open brand. We are 200 years old, but actually, we've been far out in the world for over a century. There's a lovely quote, ‘we'll go wherever ships will sail’, and I think when you've been out in the world that long, you naturally absorb the influences of the world as well. It’s made us very global and open to influence from a very early stage.”
As progress marches on, Johnnie Walker hasn’t shied away from tackling difficult, thorny subjects. Market research shows that 59.2% of Johnnie Walker drinkers in Eastern Europe are women and many of the countries in the region are still falling behind on the EU Gender Equality Index. Under the ‘Keep Walking’ ethos, ignoring an issue this obvious wouldn’t seem like the right move – instead, a direct engagement was a more authentic play for the brand. In ‘The Uncomfortable Unboxing’ Johnnie Walker collaborated with Hungary’s largest sportswear brand Dorko and the agency Publicis to create a pair of trainers with excessively long labels (designed to be cut off to make the shoes ‘walkable’) detailing the limitations and gender inequalities that affect women in Hungary on a daily basis.
Not content with a lens fixed on the contemporary, the brand – steeped as it is in history – has also looked to the past for inspiration and insight. In 1962, a single performance helped put bossa nova on the world map; it featured pioneers of the genre in Brazil: Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, Sérgio Mendes, and Carlos Lyra. One name was missing: Alaíde Costa. As one of the ‘founding mothers’ of the genre, her talent and contribution were overlooked at the time but Johnnie Walker looked to reverse that. First, by celebrating the now 88-year-old Alaíde’s illustrious career in print; second, by staging a concert at the iconic Carnegie Hall so she could take her rightful place among artists like Seu Jorge, Daniel Jobim, Roberto Menescal, and Carlinhos Brown.
Beyond the symbolic, work like this shows the brand’s commitment to making a real difference. “We’ve committed to help make the tangible change as well as making beautiful creative work the world sees,” states Jennifer.
Over the years, the ‘Keep Walking’ ethos has suffused itself not just into every aspect of the brand’s outward communications but into the very fabric of its internal operations. Speaking to Jennifer, it’s clear how much of a beacon that sentiment is. “It’s definitely baked into the values, how we work together, the ambition of the work. We set big, hairy, audacious goals.”
There’s something intrinsic to the product that encourages long-term ambition. Black Label is blended from single malts that have been aged in casks for at least 12 years. “When you put whisky down 12 years in advance, you’re always thinking 12 years into the future as well. It’s a driving force in our business. We have built in the values of progress over perfection. We're striving to bring excellence to the market, but we never let perfection get in the way of making a great next step.”
Unsurprisingly, ‘Keep Walking’ won’t be retired any time soon – maybe never. And why would it? Its inherent spirit of progress is ensuring that it’s ready to survive, evolve, and lead on whatever may come next.
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In October of this year, the Scottish National Gallery exhibited a celebratory display of the artworks by Bruce McClean, marking his 80th birthday. Among them was a satirical black and white photo of a man strolling down the road holding a long white string. Title: 'Taking a Line for a Walk'. In this literal enactment of Klee’s technique, McClean pays homage, while simultaneously problematising the great artist narrative. He takes the abstract, heady composition of Klee’s proto-Surrealist works and replaces them with the most accessible of forms, a photograph, of an instantly recognisable British sidewalk, that can and does belong to everyone, in everyday life.
With this gesture, McLean’s work takes the same rhetorical turn as the evolution of ‘keep walking’ – away from the grandeur of individual achievement and towards the collective potential of a world in which success and greatness can be for all of us just a walk, or a sip, away.
