For the third round of Spirit of Speyside: Distilled – which celebrates Speyside’s finest food and drink – we knew we needed to deliver a knockout concept to get the festival hitting the headlines… and not on the ropes.
Our brief didn’t pull any punches – we needed to focus on the region’s whole food and drink offering and not just the stellar whisky which it is best known for. It was long until we were hit by the perfect plan…
Introducing, in the red corner, the Spirit of Speyside: Distilled Oatcake Eating World Championships – a competition designed to see who can eat as many of the famous Scottish snacks in two minutes as humanly possible.
And to promote our brand new contest? A training montage worthy of the Italian Stallion himself!
We enlisted the help of well-known master distiller Graham Coull and his wife Fay to recreate Rocky’s famous training montage – all with a real Speyside twist. Ensuring we got all the event’s key partners involved was of the utmost importance, so we flexed our creative muscles to create the perfect parody.
And the results paid off – just a fortnight after it was unveiled, the video has been viewed tens of thousands of times on social media and shared around the world – a real heavyweight in terms of engagement and impact.
And, as with all great social media campaigns, the results filtered into the physical world – one passer-by even asked our star if he was shopping for oatcakes when bumping into him in the supermarket!
Spirit of Speyside: Distilled soon found itself featured in the mainstream press – notably in The Scotsman and on the front page of The Press & Journal – while whisky writers around the world jumped at the chance to throw their weight behind this championship event, including Friends of Single Malt, Whisky Girl, Master of Malt and The Spirits Business.
Why do we do PR? Because we can’t sing and dance…
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