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[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]
I spent five years in Iraq reconciling bad actors,
getting bad people to come to our side.
-[GUNSHOTS] -[INDISTINCT SHOUTING]
You had to meet with the bad people
in order to find out how to get the worst people.
[INDISTINCT CHATTER]
[INDISTINCT RADIO CHATTER]
PREGENT: Make sure your weapon's clean, your magazine's full,
your magazine's been tested,
make sure you have batteries in your night-vision googles.
It is one thing to die by the enemy's hand,
the other is to die stupid, in some sort of accident
that you didn't prepare for by doing your pre-combat checks.
[HELICOPTER HOVERING]
You get on a helicopter in the morning, fly somewhere,
meet with a tribal sheik that used to be part of al-Qaeda,
then you'll go back to the international zone,
you'll put on a suit, and you'll meet with an Iraqi official.
The worst part of it is they knew you were coming
because you had to plan the meeting.
You'll be invited in the house,
the tea will start being passed around,
the conversation will start flowing.
And then you just got to make sure your bull [BLEEP] detector is on
so you know when they're lying to you
or when they're telling you the truth.
After a while, there's an invitation from the Iraqi,
"Okay, let's drink."
And at that point, it's neat, two fingers,
everybody has a sip, the conversation is still tentative.
And then you get to that second round,
and then that second round,
that's where the truth comes out.
What was served to drink in that meeting?
We had a budget of $250 to go and find whiskey.
It honors them. You brought a gift.
And you brought something that is forbidden,
is mamnue.
But in Baghdad, it had to be Johnnie Walker Blue.
[LOOK AT ME NOWBY KING FLEXX]
KEVIN KOSAR: It signifies style, it signifies success.
JOHN HEGARTY: You've got to think about it as a movement.
KOSAR: There is an entire demographic
who wants to have a good time.
Conquered much of the Western world, America, Europe.
NASIR KHAN: It's a demigod kind of a status.
EKOW ESHUN: Turns up in a Lady Gaga song,
turns up in a Leonard Cohen song.
BARRIE WILSON: Churchill, Nixon...
JASON SOLOMONS: Someone somewhere had some Superman balls, didn't they,
to sort of say, "Yeah, yeah, we can do this."
Did whiskey have the same mystique before it became a star in the movies?
I don't think it did.
NEWSREADER: This story is criminal.
NARRATOR: Whiskey is the reward of a long, unhurried process.
HEGARTY: To make it a part of culture, a cultural phenomenon.
CAPPADONNA: To come from nothing
and make something out of ourselves, man.
That's iconic in itself.
ZAKK WYLDE: We can't have these scumbags
representing our product.
[CHUCKLING] Get out of here.
AFSHIN MOLAVI: Probably had my first taste of it
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, of all places.
Now Riyadh, of course, is a place where alcohol is banned.
Often at diplomatic gatherings, where alcohol was legal,
they would try to hide the fact that they were drinking whiskey.
We called it the golden Coca-Cola
because it would develop this golden look about it.
By the second or third golden Coca-Cola,
the deputy military attache, the first secretary were swaying,
and we called it the Coca-Cola sway.
Oh, if this bottle could talk.
This bottle has been witness to so much history over the past two centuries.
This bottle has been a witness to the Industrial Revolution.
This bottle has been witness to Winston Churchill's wartime conversations.
This bottle was on the table as Iraqi Ba'ath Party officials
in the Saddam Hussein era were debating their next moves
on repressing their own people or handling the US military.
So, in so many ways, the bottle itself, if it could talk,
it would tell us an extraordinary history of the past two centuries.
Hiya, Bill, what do you know?
Hello, Rocky, what's new?
Nothing much. A couple of whiskies.
BARRIE WILSON: Every single country pretty much around the world
has this iconic Scottish product.
However, Scottish people
can be a little bit miserable sometimes,
and it's very, very hard to tell
if they're happy or unhappy half the time.
So, I think they're proud. I'm proud.
Och! No, no, laddie. That's no way to take a dram.
This is something that time and history has given us,
the Scot has been marked out as the custodian of ultimate perfection.
NICHOLAS MORGAN: For someone whose name is now known all over the world,
John Walker is one of the most remarkably
anonymous characters in history.
So John's father was a tenant at a farm
just outside Kilmarnock called Todriggs Farm.
He died young.
John was only 14, and the goods of the farm,
the cows and the seeds and all that, were sold,
and that was John's inheritance.
And that money is invested in 1820 in a grocer's shop in Kilmarnock
that is a very prosperous grocery business,
which specializes in blending.
[PEPPY MUSIC]
It was incumbent upon grocers to bring things in, blend them,
mix them to get the distinctive product to give to their customers.
Tea, principally, was the product in the 1820s.
When John started blending whiskey,
he would have been applying those skills that he learned from tea.
WILSON: You're taking over 40 different whiskies together,
and each of these whiskies
has a completely unique and different character.
Bunches of apples and pears, chocolate and honey...
So you're actually blending these together to create something quite magical.
Blending was illegal back then.
But even ten years ago, I nearly got punched
for mixing a ginger ale in a Johnnie Walker.
So imagine 200 years ago what would have happened.
MAN: It's alive! It's loose!
We've done it, Charles. We've done it.
You've got to ruffle a few feathers, I think,
if you're a creative genius like he was.
ALICE LASCELLES: There's an amazing alchemy that happens.
As you bring those different components together,
they'll often create a new thing.
There's this mystery at the heart of whiskey-making.
There's a whole lot about distilling we don't understand. Nobody does.
[ELECTRICITY CRACKLES]
JOHN WILLIAMS: In 200 years, we've only had six master blenders.
In that same period of time, there's been 40 US Presidents.
I just love that dichotomy of the scale and availability of Johnnie Walker.
But yet, it's led by this small group of passionate people.
We're working with this ever-changing palate,
so it's never the same.
Every time you look at it, it's a snapshot in time.
And each time they're being brought together in a slightly different way,
but always creates the same whiskey that you get in the bottle each time.
You always learn from the past, but then you think about the future
because we're laying down stocks
that may not be consumed for another, say, 12 years.
People in the past have been snooty about blends,
but actually when you think about what it takes
in terms of gathering from different sources,
they were really smart.
The only whiskey they had available before
would change every time they tried it.
And they were able to ensure that the blend tasted the same.
WILSON: Unfortunately, right now, blends are seen inferior
to single malts by, you know, those people who just see an age statement
and think that, you know, the older, the better.
Don't listen to these guys.
It's about the bartenders, the chefs, the guys who make it.
[CHUCKLES] Listen to them, you know, don't listen to Tony in the pub.
Tony knows [BLEEP] all. [LAUGHING]
What can I get you, sir?
Oh, uh, whisky and gin.
Whiskey and gin.
CAPPADONNA: To create these iconic blends
you have to keep poking at it and poking at it.
The more you blend it in and blend it up together,
I mean, you are guaranteed to come with something good, man.
To come from nothing and make something out of ourselves, man.
That's iconic in itself.
MORGAN: The most important asset that you have as a grocer is your name.
Because with your name comes all the trust and the respect.
So, it's natural that when you make your whiskey,
you are going to call it "John Walker's whiskey."
Brands existed because we industrialized.
We moved from the countryside into cities.
So, if you were buying something from your neighbor,
if it was wrong, you'd go over and,
"Oi! You've just sold me something that is no good."
Whereas, once you moved to a city,
you weren't necessarily buying from around you.
So brands emerged as a way of providing you with the things you needed,
but at their core, their trust.
I can trust that company, that person to deliver what they're saying.
MORGAN: Behind his grocery shop, the Kilmarnock Water runs.
and in 1852, out of nowhere, there's a massive flood.
Businesses where John Walker's were would have been washed away.
But five years later, when John dies,
he leaves behind him this very prosperous business.
These people are from Kilmarnock. It's a tough place.
West of Scotland's a tough place.
I mean, people are very resilient to what life throws at you.
You have to be.
It's all about resilience.
CAPPADONNA: You gotta be resilient, man. You gotta be flexible.
When times are hard, man,
you just got to be ready for the changes when they come.
You know, there's another name for the whiskey. They call it spirits.
It's good spirits, man. [CHUCKLES]
MOLAVI: As Johnnie Walker began to rise,
in many ways, it mimicked the rise of Europe,
Johnnie Walker rode the wave of the Industrial Revolution.
Johnnie Walker also rode the wave of the British Empire.
[CHUCKLING] It was always 5:00 somewhere.
One of the biggest changes during that period
is this sense of opportunity that this expanding world brings with it.
The interesting thing, if you look at how these markets seem to grow,
is that it follows the discovery of mineral wealth,
and in 19th century, that is gold.
The British Empire is the biggest trading unit the world has ever seen
and taking expat Scots all over the world,
and one of the things that many expat Scots
take with them is a liking of whiskey.
WILSON: It was the first global brand,
even before Coca-Cola was on the shores of multiple countries,
and the way they've done that is basically bartering and bargaining with the ships.
I can just imagine these ships, you know,
sailing across the oceans, and the Johnnie Walker in those ships
must have been very tempting to the whole crew. [CHUCKLES]
And it'd be interesting to see the depletions by the time
they got to somewhere like Australia.
[SERENE MUSIC]
[INDISTINCT ANNOUNCEMENT ON PA]
[SITHU THET SPEAKING BURMESE]
[INDISTINCT CHEERING]
SOPHIA BUSH: [IN ENGLISH] When you think about human history
and all the terrible things we've done to each other,
when something for hundreds of years
can carry a positive connotation,
is something that people can continue to be proud of, that's rare.
For an idea to survive for that long
means it's got something kind of magic about it.
That's why certain books are classics,
that's why certain movies never got old.
That's why Johnnie Walker is, we talk about the iconography,
but it's iconic. The brand is actually iconic.
When you are a part of someone's life,
as you are when you are the whiskey people drink at home,
or the whiskey they drink after work with friends,
you're actually present for really intimate moments,
and thus, you're a part of that intimacy itself.
When you become part of someone's experience,
part of someone's story,
you mean something to those people.
[INAUDIBLE]
It was John Walker's son Alexander that really took the brand global.
He set up shop in London, and he created this myth around Johnnie Walker.
This myth around this idea that this is an aspirational drink.
You have arrived if you can drink Johnnie Walker.
So he was a marketing genius.
MORGAN: You have a growing middle class
who've got increasingly disposable income to spend on small luxuries.
It's this idea that whiskey is associated with status,
is a sign that you have arrived.
CHRISTINE McCAFFERTY: Alexander's one of my heroes.
John Walker is our founding father.
He set up the business. He started making his whiskies.
It's John's name on the bottle.
But without Alexander, his son, and then the generation that came after,
we wouldn't have the business.
And I think Alexander was key
in making what was quite a small grocery shop selling whiskies
a much more commercial venture.
MORGAN: The first thing that he did
was have this label at a funny angle on the bottle.
And it very simply said, "John Walker & Sons Old Highland Whiskey."
Around the same time, he introduced a square bottle.
You could get more square bottles into a case,
and therefore, more cases onto a boat.
There were no rules.
No one had done what people like John, Alexander Walker,
in particular Alexander Walker, did.
No one had done it in the past, so they made the rules as they went on.
The Johnnie Walker bottle has by and large stayed the same
for most of its history. And so what that means is,
Johnnie Walker itself has this Zelig-like quality,
which is to say that it could appear at different moments in time and culture,
but it can also be the same across all of those.
I think it speaks trans-historically.
NARRATOR: People, people from all walks of life on any old street,
wherever they might be, people like...
Good old Johnnie Walker.
It was something more than luck
that brought us up through the years
Though Lady Luck had a lot to do with it.
[GENTLE MUSIC]
MOLAVI: In the mid-to-late 19th century,
there was a devastating insect pest
that hit most of France's vineyards,
and something like three-fourths of France's vineyards lost their production.
Well, what did that mean?
That meant that a lot of the wine
that made its way to Victorian England,
and particularly a lot of the brandy
that made its way to Victorian England,
was no longer available.
Enter whiskey. Enter Johnnie Walker.
It was a market opportunity that was created
by the loss of another competitor.
It's a very interesting one. How does a brand go from
being a regarded brand to being an iconic brand?
You have to have a sense of purpose.
You have to have a sense of value.
And in a way, you're that sort of captain of a ship in a stormy sea. You stay calm,
you stay certain, certain in your ways.
And over time, you then become iconic.
You become somebody that people want to follow,
because you have a certainty about you.
[HEAVY METAL MUSIC]
I guess it's one of the few jobs that it's not frowned upon
when you're drinking on the job. [CHUCKLES]
If you stick three bottles of booze in your body, and then
a case of beer and spin them around a couple of times and just watch them go,
pretty much gonna be chances of more chaos happening
than, you know, having maybe a double espresso.
Well, the reason why it was called Black Label Society,
we like music and we like getting hammered.
We had these grand plans.
I go, "Hopefully, we'll get an endorsement from Johnnie Walker."
[CHUCKLES] And then we'll have it served at all the gigs,
and then we'll get, you know...
We'll just be swimming in the stuff, you know what I mean?
Actually, we'll have a pool in the backyard
which is shaped like Johnnie Walker with Johnnie Walker.
What they said was, "We have a reputable brand here.
"We can't have these scumbags representing our product.
"Get out of here."
I could see that board meeting. That lasted about maybe three seconds.
[LAUGHING]
MORGAN: When Alexander dies, Alexander's two sons, Jack and George,
his younger son Alexander is also brought into the business.
Flamboyant, they were not, and they were also, I think, very put out
when they began to realize that their consumers, in fact,
had given their business a name, which was Johnnie Walker,
which the family hated because they felt it was disrespectful to the founder.
But to exploit this name that already existed in popular culture
was the thing that the business had to do
for the huge success of the brand.
WILSON: It was in a restaurant/cafe in 1909
where the family met
an illustrator called Tom Browne.
Back in 1909,
just over a drink and over a lunch
and within 10 minutes,
he sketched the striding man,
which is still on every single bottle of Johnnie Walker to this day.
That, for me, was that moment that Johnnie Walker really started walking.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
McCAFFERTY: A lot of Scotch whiskey brands around at that time,
a lot of them using quite traditional cues
to communicate about their brands, "How can we be different?
"But how can we have something that people can really build a relationship with?"
So he is like a living, breathing character
of the brand. He is Johnnie Walker.
What Johnnie Walker did was they said, "We want a symbol
"that stands for what we are."
The striding man became that,
that symbol of progress, that symbol of moving forward.
The great thing for Johnnie Walker is you've gone beyond whiskey,
you're now Johnnie Walker, and that's a great achievement.
Oh, man, the spirit of the striding man is to keep moving.
You've got to keep moving, you know.
If you stop, you drop.
That's what the walk is all about.
SEAN MIYASHIRO: Striding is... You're not walking.
You're striding, you're walking confidently with a purpose,
with a little pep in your step.
And I think that, you know, the striding man is fashionable,
he's got some zest, he's got some swagger.
And I think that individuality and being a visionary,
and having a place to go and all those things combined
make it incredibly aspirational.
MOLAVI: The key moment of alchemy is when Johnnie Walker
fused its brand with aspiration.
Because there is nothing more human than aspiring to a better life,
to walking forward, to leaning forward.
You are not drinking a glass of whiskey,
you are drinking a glass of aspiration.
ED DAVIES: Johnnie Walker has always been a huge brand here in Brazil.
It's one of the most name-checked brands
in a funk ostentacao style of music,
which is a kind of Brazilian hip-hop.
It appears in all the music videos,
you'll see a bunch of dancing girls
and they'll be literally holding the bottle in their hand,
waving it at the camera.
Johnnie Walker is a brand that kind of cuts across
all the different strata of Brazilian society, you know?
And Brazil is a really stratified society.
Brazil since the '90s had a huge economic leap
where a lot of people suddenly had spending power
that they didn't have before.
And so the way for them to express that,
their new kind of success and their new affluence
is exactly through these brands that they can now afford,
that they never used to be able to.
[SPEAKING PORTUGUESE]
[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC]
[SPEAKING PORTUGUESE]
[ALL CHANTING IN PORTUGUESE]
DAVIES: [IN ENGLISH] The protest started off about a 20-cent rise
in the price of a bus fare in Sao Paulo.
And the impact that would have,
particularly on the poor communities
who have to travel a long way to get to and from their jobs.
It was really violently subdued by the police.
They fired tear gas, rubber bullets.
[LOUD GUNSHOT]
More and more people started coming out in the streets.
The larger the protest got, the more it started to become just about
the social and political problems that Brazil has.
The phrase gigante esta acordado, the giant has awoken,
became one of the kind of catchphrases of that protest movement.
[SPEAKING PORTUGUESE]
[INDISTINCT SHOUTING AND CHANTING]
[IN ENGLISH] The movement started to get appropriated by so many different groups.
You know, you had communists on one side
and white supremacists on the other side,
instead of being a movement that unified the whole of Brazil,
it became something that actually divided brazil even more.
[SPEAKING PORTUGUESE]
[CHUCKLES]
[LAUGHS]
MORGAN: [IN ENGLISH] During the First World War,
the price of whiskey had soared
through constant increases in government duty.
The availability of whiskey had declined
because distilling was almost entirely stopped.
The fear that the government had was that munitions workers
in industrial areas such as Clydeside
were going into pubs, buying cheaper, young whiskies,
and as a result of excessive consumption,
unable to work, and therefore putting the war effort in danger,
which leads to a number of restrictions
that are placed on the industry.
Already a very complex backdrop
onto which the influenza pandemic
following the First World War was added.
When it came to celebrating the company's centenary in 1920,
in some respects, they were very muted about it.
But the one thing I think they did do was go out to the world
with a very optimistic message.
It's interesting that during the first centennial
of Johnnie Walker in 1920,
their advertisements
were quite clear on the philosophy,
which was "Still going strong."
These were people who kept looking for ways to move the product.
[BUGLE JINGLE PLAYS]
NEWSREADER: And this story is criminal.
Ten thousand gallons of whiskey,
wine, and beer are chucked away,
bust up, destroyed and wasted in New York.
LASCELLES: During Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933,
it was illegal for American distilleries to make whiskey,
but people still wanted to drink hard liquor.
So there was suddenly this big gap in the market for booze.
KOSAR: On the books, we had laws saying,
you're not allowed to drink, but everyone was drinking.
A lot of what was being sold by illicit producers was dangerous.
So Johnnie Walker was moved in through the country through Canada
and also through the Gulf of Mexico, came on up through the South.
When you have a small Caribbean nation that's largely poor,
there's no way that that population is consuming all that alcohol.
It's clearly coming in and moving off.
You had a lot of whiskey smugglers who were bringing whiskey
into the United States, and the square bottle fit very neatly
inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread.
LASCELLES: When Scotch was being tasted against bathtub gin,
it probably came out of the comparison pretty well.
And so it gained this real reputation
for quality and finesse and desirability.
And so, by the end of Prohibition,
there was this whole new generation of Scotch whiskey drinkers
and I believe that by the end of the '30s,
America accounted for something like 60% of all Scotch whiskey exports.
[INQUISITIVE MUSIC]
NARRATOR: Whiskey is the reward of a long, unhurried process,
during which the utmost care is taken to ensure
that the highest standard of quality is maintained,
then and only then is the blended whiskey ready
for bottling, inspection, and packing into the cases
in which it will find its way to every part of the world.
Whiskey distillers must be the best geopolitical risk practitioners
to think that 12 years from now, 15 years from now,
there's going to be a market.
You either have extraordinary confidence in your product,
or you have an extraordinary ability to forecast geopolitical events.
I think it's the former rather than the latter.
BEVERIDGE: I think if you look at the history of Johnnie Walker,
it is the story of adaption
-to what prevails at the current time. -Mmm.
We have to adapt to the present, but we also have to think about
what the future might look as well
and begin to adapt for that.
But I think there's a certain optimism behind all that.
Yeah.
The belief that, yes, things are going to change
as they have done in the past,
but we have the skills and the ability to deal with that.
And that, I think, is the sense of where Johnnie Walker is just now.
MAN: [ON LOUDSPEAKER] Fire at will!
MORGAN: 1920s and 1930s and 1940s period
is one of real difficulty for the businesses.
Each time they go into one of those troughs of despond,
business emerges stronger, remarkably stronger on each occasion.
So the graph, if you will, goes like this.
It's all about resilience.
[FULL STAR BY DAN THE AUTOMATOR]
CAPPADONNA: As long as you're consistent,
don't change what you're doing.
Though sometimes it's not necessarily the product itself
that needs to change with the times,
sometimes it's just the wrapping.
[CHUCKLES] You know?
The presentation.
Instead of having a blue bottle,
you might want to change it to silver.
[CHUCKLES] You know?
Like my new look.
You know, they think this is gray right here,
but this is just platinum.
I'm going platinum right now, you know?
For me, consistency is key behind a brand,
and you see so many brands failing nowadays
by changing every year.
Changing, it's not working.
Give it time, give it time, and sell it to the Americans.
[LAUGHS]
NARRATOR: To the United States went the best that Britain could produce.
And in its going, many a bitter tear was shed.
KOSAR: So after the horrors of World War II,
the Johnnie Walker brand came into an America
that was able to start spending money on the good things in life.
So in its advertisements, you would see the guy of leisure,
who's always going places and always having fun, no matter where he's at.
Being a playboy, being a player,
being this dandy-esque figure became accepted.
While America was tearing itself apart over race,
Johnnie Walker drops an ad which doesn't take a stand
on separate schools or anything like that.
They didn't mention politics at all.
They simply showed successful black men
dressed in ties and suits,
behaving like good executives would.
This was a time when schools were still segregated here,
when a black man who dared
to walk into a white neighborhood
may not walk out.
It was very brave.
I think it just fits with the entire enterprising character of the company,
to realize that there's an entire demographic
who is growing more affluent
and who wants to have a good time.
And so, it only made sense
to make that leap and market to them.
[SWING MUSIC]
MORGAN: In the '50s and '60s, they bring in new people
who are very often public school educated,
very often good military background,
guards was always considered to be pretty good.
And these guys travelled the world in the 1960s and 1970s,
to use a Walker word, relentlessly.
They were never off airplanes.
It's like those films you used to see in the 1960s,
which always had shots of airplanes taking off and airplanes landing
and airplanes taking off, airplanes landing,
that was what these Walker guys did.
They were, in a sense, a sort of a symbol of the striding man.
I could actually go anywhere,
I could go into any environment,
and I could succeed, I could be accepted.
I would be able to navigate my way through the culture or whatever it was,
and be able to kind of talk in a very urbane and stylish way.
MORGAN: I think there was certainly an expectation
that these people had the ability
to withstand the most hostile business entertainment
and still be at work the next day.
[SWING MUSIC]
[INAUDIBLE]
HOST: We have a number of questions, curiously enough,
about your favorite things.
One wants to know things you can't live without when travelling.
And one person, one well-informed audience member, of course,
wants to know what your favorite whiskey is.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]
Well, I don't see what the difference between the two questions.
[HOST AND AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
[APPLAUSE]
The favorite blended,
the best blended Scotch in the history of the world,
which was also the favorite drink
of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party,
as it is still of the Palestinian Authority
and the Libyan dictatorship
and large branches
of the Saudi Arabian royal family.
Johnnie Walker Black, breakfast of champions.
-Accept no substitutes. -[LAUGHTER]
I'm a photojournalist, storyteller, filmmaker.
I work mostly in war zones, conflict areas,
covering a humanitarian catastrophe.
Right now I am in Baghdad Hotel, here in the bar.
This is a special place for us that cover the situation in Iraq.
During many years, the Baghdad Hotel has been hosting
a lot of journalists and also a lot of military people
drinking some shots of whiskey
and having meetings and planning for the next development,
the next job, the next assignment.
I would like to be sometimes a bottle of whiskey
to know what they are talking about.
It's very important for us who do this kind of job
to find a safe place.
No matter where we go, and no matter how dangerous it is
the place that we are going,
it's very important we have a place to come back.
If you go to anywhere in Iraq, there is a lot of fake whiskey going on.
The one that you're going to trust on the table
is Johnnie Walker for everyone.
People don't know the name of the car.
They don't know the name even of some villages here in Iraq.
But everyone knows when you talk about whiskey
that the most important one here is Johnnie Walker.
I cannot tell you right now how many times I almost died,
bombs exploding nearby me a hundred times,
and so every time that I am back, it is time to celebrate
because I have my life.
When you come back to the real life,
and you sit in the normal table,
and you get some shots of whiskey,
and you drink this whiskey, it's like,
you made it up, you survived.
BARTENDER 1: Whiskey is a conversation.
That's the whole point of whiskey.
Whiskey is for everybody. It's made by a bunch of farmers in Scotland.
It's a drink for the people. For some strange reason,
when it came down south, it was just like it came really...
I don't know, just like uppity class.
-I think we used the term [BLEEP] a lot. -[OTHERS LAUGH]
The stigma is just old white men in smoking jackets, drinking whiskey.
Everybody experiences some stigma
and some very strange and perhaps dated opinions,
and where do these opinions come from?
That there's certain flavors for women,
or that women are not going to enjoy whiskey, for example.
It's about education for me.
A lot of people now are open-minded to that changing.
But I've seen that there's no correlation at all to who you are
and what flavors you're going to enjoy.
BARTENDER 1: Get rid of that stigma behind whiskey
because there's so much stigma
and so much [BLEEP] around whiskey that it is just a good quality drink.
-Thank you very much. -Pleasure.
-Slainte. -[LAUGHING]
LASCELLES: There's quite a lot of peacocking around whiskey
and sort of bashing each other over the head
with knowledge and showing off,
and just very broadly speaking, I think women tend to go in for less of that.
It's still seen as a bit racy for a woman to go into a bar
and order a neat whiskey even now,
but that is gradually changing.
KOSAR: A lot of the advertisements
for liquor that included women
had women basically as elbow candy.
They were, you know, what the successful man gets.
Instead, Johnnie Walker put an ad out there just showing successful women
behaving as equals,
and one woman would say, "He respects me for my mind,
"He doesn't mind that I earn more than he does.
"He's not married or anything, and he drinks Johnnie Walker."
BUSH: I am a longtime whiskey drinker, actually, and it's funny,
I think it's become a bit more popular with women
and, you know, the craft cocktail movement has certainly changed things.
But there was nothing like ten years ago,
ordering an Old Fashioned at a bar,
and every guy at the bar's head turns and goes,
"Who are you ordering that for?" And my answer always was, "Me."
[LAUGHS]
I think perhaps it's theMad Men era that did some of that.
You know, a bunch of guys in suits.
We were always in the room. We just weren't being given access to the power,
and we weren't being given the credit.
[DANCE MUSIC]
ESHUN: In the 1980s, the brand makes a conscious effort
to be actively, visibly part of the culture.
And so, you start to see it turn up
in movies and in advertising much more visibly.
SOLOMONS: I think whiskey is the drink of the movies.
I mean, did whiskey have the same mystique
before it became a star in the movies?
I don't think it did.
I think the smartest move
that Johnnie Walker probably ever made
was to make the label at that 24 angle degree
because even when it's blurred in a film
or turned around in a film,
you can still see the label creeping around.
You immediately know
that that's a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
-Thank you. -MAN: [ON PHONE] Yes, sir.
[PHONE BEEPS]
I always loved Superman III.
It was supposed to be the silly one,
but that's why it works.
Richard Lester directs it,
and it's got Pamela Stephenson and Richard Pryor in it.
And I always thought it was hilarious, Superman III.
And it's really good to put humor into what is essentially a very serious genre,
the superhero genre, even still.
And when Christopher Reeve's Superman, in Superman III,
goes to the dark side because he's had a dose of deadly kryptonite,
he sits in a diner and has a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label
very conspicuously turned towards camera
and uses it for sadness, uses it to get drunk,
uses it to contemplate evil.
[CHUCKLES] And the evil that's involved is
trashing other brands,
flicking peanuts with his supercharged Superman fingers
and destroying other brands right before your eyes.
Hey, hey! Hey, come on.
Someone somewhere had some Superman balls, didn't they,
to sort of say, "Yeah, yeah, we can do this.
"We can have Superman," who is in some way
a sort of Christ figure for saving America,
"have him trashing all the other brands."
They jumped the shuttle off-world.
Killed the crew and passengers.
Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, he drinks whiskey.
RICK DECKARD: Do you want a drink? No?
SOLOMONS: He's the man that needs to do one last job.
So he's going to need whiskey to gird his loins.
To solve this mystery,
he needs Johnnie Walker as his companion to keep walking.
He's using it medicinally to get over a beating,
he's using it to soothe his mind,
he's using it to plaster over those wounds,
but he's also using it to concentrate.
DECKARD: Enhance 224 to 176.
[BEEPING]
[AFFIRMATIVE BEEPS]
[FILM CLICKING]
SOLOMONS: It's interesting, isn't it?
He could do this with a cup of tea, but then we'd be comforted
and I think we need more than comfort.
You like whiskey?
I got millions
of bottles of whiskey. [SIGHS WEARILY]
In the remake or the update, the 2049 Blade Runner
with Ryan Gosling in the lead,
this is a much more brand-oriented world.
Some brands have survived from the previous existence,
and they have followed it through.
Some key markers of Western civilization, if you like,
and some things will survive.
Well, Johnnie Walker has clearly survived.
Still the same color, still burning brightly as ever,
still promising that mystery.
I think it is key that the character must maintain his whiskey brand
though all that he has gone through.
Through all the iterations, through all the disappointments,
he is going to stick to one brand.
One thing he knows for sure is he is going to get his joy from that bottle.
Everything else around us watching the movie
within the movie has changed.
We're in the future.
Johnnie Walker remains the same.
Ultra-intelligent AI, replicants, flying cars,
none of these things have quite come true yet.
But the one thing that remains true
and visible and recognizable
in both those films is the bottle of Johnnie Walker.
And, in a way, this is actually quite a safe prediction for the future.
So perhaps we won't have flying cars anytime soon,
but it is quite likely that a bottle of Johnnie Walker will look the same
in 20, 50, maybe 100 years' time
as it did 100 years ago.
People always say, "Oh, it's terrible,
"product placement, and it's not right.
"It shouldn't be done."
And I do point out that actually
it was the Venetians who invented product placement.
And there's a very famous painting by Titian.
It's called The Annunciation.
And if you look at that painting, in the right-hand corner,
there's a clear decanter glass.
Maybe Mary wanted a drink?
I don't know what it was there for.
[CHUCKLES] No, no, no. It wasn't for that reason.
It was there because the Venetians were very proud of their industry.
So their artists used to insert elements of what they could do,
so that they could say to the Florentines, or the Romans,
"Look, see you might be able to paint a picture,
"but you can't do glass the way we do it.
"It's there, you can have a look at it."
It was the Venetians who invented product placement.
-DECKARD: Enhance. Stop. -[FILM CLICKING]
-[ALARM BEEPING] -[ENERGETIC MUSIC]
MORGAN: In 1997, someone called Alice Avis
was put in charge of Johnnie Walker,
and she took the view that
a lot of the advertising had become cliched
and quite stereotyped around the world.
Alice realized that masculinity lay at the heart of
what the brand was about,
but didn't think that people really understood what masculinity meant
in a modern world.
So they did a massive global study on masculinity.
[INAUDIBLE]
Now, you better start telling me what happened.
I was having a few drinks, and I got into an argument with some cat
about the role of modern man in society.
Then things began to get all foggy.
HEGARTY: They came to us, and at that time,
whiskey advertising was all about "Be successful,"
and they represented success as a place,
a penthouse, or somebody who was always in a tuxedo,
and it was maybe undone. How daring.
Oh, I'll just undo the tie. Ooh, that'll be very daring.
Or I'm on the back of some boat in, you know, Monaco
or wherever it might be.
But that was an increasingly old-fashioned view of success.
Success isn't a place, it's a journey.
And truly successful people never arrive
because they keep moving forward.
From that, you very, very quickly get to keep walking.
And that, in a sense, liberated the category
from talking like a conventional whiskey.
And so, we created advertising
that was unlike a whiskey brand.
It was a moment when the brand really came back into itself,
and it had confidence, and it was able to kind of
go into the marketplace and put a bottle on the table
and say, "This is what we stand for."
And people bought it, and it succeeded.
You can see it from, you know, the sales figures.
Then we got to the man who walked around the world,
which is a lovely description of the brand,
and where it had come from, and where it was going to.
-[BAGPIPES PLAYING AND STOPPING] -Hey, piper.
Shut it.
Here's a true story about a young lad named John.
Just a local farm boy. There was something special about the lad.
-We were up at the... -Druim M'Aodhaig.
Yes, that's right. We were up at the castle in Scotland.
-As you are. -[CHUCKLING] As you are.
I just had this idea that I'd love to be able to tell
the Johnnie Walker story without cutting.
And at the time, I remember thinking,
I hope the story doesn't take more than about 60 to 90 seconds
-because I think it would be hard to do it otherwise. -[BOTH LAUGH]
Well, these were the days when young boys were sent into the fields,
the mills, the mines, tough times.
But young John was smart enough to be lucky.
His father's farm, where he was born and raised, was sold,
and the proceeds used to open a grocers.
You'd have one actor talk non-stop, eyeballing the camera
for six and a half minutes on point
with, I think, something like 18 hit points along the way.
No director, no production company wanted to take it on.
He had to walk a certain number of paces out of the mist,
towards the bagpiper, to turn at that right moment
and say, "Shut it," to walk a few more steps to start the thing
that had the cow turn its head, that then...
And when you look back on it, you think, "What on Earth were we thinking?"
Does he get his hat out of his pocket at just the right moment?
Isn't there just the right spot to pick up the whiskey
from the table where he's talking about Johnnie Walker Blue, or...
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Two hundred years later, and Johnnie Walker's still walking,
and he's not showing any signs of stopping.
MAHONY: It was 42 takes across the two days.
I remember hearing, I think it must have been
just before lunch on the final day.
"Yeah, we still haven't got one."
[LAUGHING]
Yeah, it was the last take? The last take is the film.
Because that was the only one that actually really worked.
ESHUN: I find brands like Johnnie Walker really fascinating
because they, in a number of different ways,
have managed to hold on to a place in the world,
despite how quickly and how profoundly the world continues to change.
The identity is so strong that it seems to transcend time,
it seems to transcend place,
and it seems to speak of universality,
though it has this fascinating symbolic quality to it,
as well as just a simple thing of being something expensive
and something that's perceived as luxury.
It ends up as this totemic item that can be used in bargains,
can be used in rituals, can be used in music.
So Johnnie Walker, for instance,
turns up in a Lady Gaga song,
turns up in a Leonard Cohen song.
This is one way of saying, "We'll take the icons
"and the brands of Western culture and Western society,
"and we will make them over in our own terms."
And that, I think, is how you get to be part of the culture.
It's that it's been able to simplify its message,
so if you're in India or if you're in Afghanistan or if you're in Myanmar
or if you're in different parts of Europe,
if you're in mid-century America,
let's say, those perceived values don't change.
MIYASHIRO: Brands connecting with culture,
doesn't matter if it's sport or music or whatever,
you know, is a decades-old thing,
but you have to have everything.
It's the cross-pollination of traditional advertising,
which is the amplification of everything.
But what is the core idea actually is the genesis of everything, right?
It's not just all about going to, "Hey.
"Who's the number one actor or the pop star?"
The obvious choice is really understanding
who is creating and innovating.
Those brands do quite well.
Well, you know, you've always got to be careful.
There are many great brands who've gone.
You know? I've worked on some of them.
Polaroid, one of them, didn't innovate, of course.
And great brands can die.
You get trapped by your own success.
I mean, you can look at great bands, great...
And you can look at how they had to keep moving forward.
You know, you look at the Beatles, and how they started singing,
"She loves you. Yeah. Yeah. " And end up with Sgt. Pepper,
and they constantly move forward,
whereas other bands didn't.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
KOSAR: Johnnie Walker whiskey has conquered much of the Western world.
The real action is in the developing markets.
[INDISTINCT CHEERING]
LASCELLES: If you look at emerging markets,
where Johnnie Walker is taking off is always a good barometer
of an emerging economic market.
MOLAVI: Any study of whiskey, any study of Johnnie Walker
has to focus on India.
India is the largest whiskey-consuming nation.
In India, Johnnie Walker has a localized nickname.
They call it "Uncle Johnnie."
[BOLLYWOOD MUSIC]
Johnnie Walker regularly appears in Bollywood films,
so much so that there is a prominent Indian actor
in Bollywood who changed his name to Johnny Walker.
[INAUDIBLE]
NASIR KHAN: It's a demigod kind of a status that film stars have here.
There are so many temples that are named after actors,
and the statues are made, and they worship them.
He is one of the pillars of the Indian cinema, my father.
And I turn around and tell people
that I have Johnny Walker running in my veins.
Ooh.
[SPEAKING HINDI]
Huh?
KHAN: [IN ENGLISH] As a teenager,
he used to go to the studios,
he used to look around for work.
So my dad used to act like a drunk very, very well.
[SPEAKING HINDI]
[IN ENGLISH] So he barged in the office as an alcoholic
and started creating a ruckus over there,
went to Guru Dutt, who was the director,
started troubling him, hassling him,
to the point where they had him thrown out of the office.
So Guru Dutt, being the director,
was extremely impressed by my father.
He said, "This is one scene I can offer you."
[SLURRING IN HINDI]
KHAN: [IN ENGLISH] Guru Dutt came up with the name.
He said, "You need a screen name, just call yourself Johnny Walker."
-[JOHNNY WALKER CLEARS THROAT] -[CLEARS THROAT IN RESPONSE]
-[JOHNNY WALKER CLEARS THROAT] -[COUGHING]
A lot of people used to think that
the whiskey was named after my dad Johnny Walker.
Irony, part of it that my father, he was a devout Muslim
and because it's not allowed to drink in our religion,
he never touched alcohol in his life.
[VIOLIN MUSIC]
MARIE MACKLIN: Johnnie Walker was always that beating heart of the town.
There were 700 jobs employed in the town,
and the money that was spent wasn't just local,
it was in local shops,
but it was in the surrounding areas of Ayrshire.
We were at the forefront of the first Industrial Revolution.
REPORTER: Each bottle proudly displays Kilmarnock as its origin.
The 700 people who work here are part of the town's heritage,
but soon, these gates will be closed forever.
MACKLIN: Johnnie Walker wanted to be more commercial
to retain the business and make that business grow.
At the time of exit,
they would be the last big industrial employer in Kilmarnock.
So that was like the final nail in the coffin.
The Industrial Revolution of the 1800s was now gone.
Do you stand back and do nothing? That's just not an option.
I remember going buying the costumes,
buying the ribbons, buying placards.
An hour before, there was about 20 people.
And then, all of a sudden, the place just descended with people.
[INDISTINCT CHANTING]
We needed a new college.
The college was from the 1960s.
Eight acres of the site was donated for a pound,
and a new Â£50 million college was built,
funded by the Scottish government.
So the legacy that Diageo is leaving
is just the start of another journey
for that community that we have been at the forefront of driving.
That Johnnie Walker spirit is still alive,
but it's just the different shoes that keep on walking.
I think today... I think a brand is much more
about a movement than just about trust.
You gotta think about it as a movement.
What are you trying to change?
What are you trying to bring to the world?
As an example, I think Apple is a very good example of that movement.
It was bringing computing to the people.
That was its great thing. And therefore, a brand has to stand for more.
Are we about the future? Are we making this product in a way
which is sustainable? Are we caring for the planet?
Are we... All those things before you actually
get to, "What does it taste like?"
The new consumer, certainly the millennial consumer
would like to see companies giving back to communities.
I think they would also like to see in some ways
an understanding and an appreciation for the heritage of a brand.
BUSH: I think the days of just making something
and being a sort of hazy figure in the distance,
that doesn't work for people anymore.
We want to know where our money's going
because every dollar that we spend is a vote.
So we want to know who's behind the brand?
What do they believe in? What is their ethos?
How do they treat the people at their company?
Do they pay them fair wages?
Do employees get maternity and paternity leave?
These things are important to consumers now.
I think the future is about being thoughtfully inclusive.
I think the future is about
building bigger tables and longer bars
for people to sit at and toast together,
and dream up ideas
and innovations in ways to advance the world for good.
They came to me to talk about leading for women.
And we opened an exhibition.
Not every brand is that willing to
"put their neck out there."
I only want to run in circles with people who say,
"How much further can we push this? How much more can we
"yank on the end of the moral arc of the universe
"and continue to bend it toward justice?"
If it's possible, we have to contribute to that.
ESHUN: I think the old anxiety was that in getting into bed with a brand,
you'd have to change, you'd have to become a corporate shill
or something like that. Now it's the opposite.
Now it feels like brands spend a lot of time
trying to catch up with these sort of powerfully totemic individuals themselves
that can speak all around the world at the same time.
Social media has disrupted so many of these traditional forms of communication,
so right now, you know, you can go to Instagram
and you can have a much more intimate relationship with a star.
HEGARTY: I'm slightly suspicious of those things.
Every other ad for a watch has got a star in it.
The brand should be the hero.
Don't go and buy another hero.
The advertising world is perhaps skeptical
of the role of brand ambassadors and the environment we have
where culture and commerce blend together that much more easily.
Because what gets left out of that game is the idea
that the thing the brand needs to do to sell itself is a 30-second commercial.
That feels like a fantastically anachronistic idea right now,
when in fact you can cut out the middleman
and go straight to the individual at the heart of this.
[ELECTRONIC MUSIC PLAYING]
WILLIAMS: Johnnie Walker was founded on the principle
that we'd make whiskey for everybody.
And it was true 200 years ago,
and it remains true today.
What we have to do, what we must do
is keep Johnnie Walker vibrant,
so that we're making whiskey exciting for everybody,
so that we're creating the next generation of whiskey lovers.
[INAUDIBLE]
Johnnie Walker, 200 years old.
Will they be here in 100 years' time?
I hope so. They've got to be distinctive, be daring, be different.
Believe in me.
MOLAVI: Johnnie Walker has been nimble over the past 200 years, clearly.
They're going to have to show that same nimbleness over the next 100 years
in order to remain an iconic brand, like they are today.
They've got their ear to the ground all the time,
and they really know where stuff is happening.
I think that's probably something that they have done really well
over the decades.
Staying optimistic is the way that you can pull people together,
and the Johnnie Walker icon has just become a symbol of that in many places.
The strength of the idea is infinite.
Keep walking, you know, takes you everywhere.
[FULL STAR BY DAN THE AUTOMATOR]
HEGARTY: People need inspiration,
people need to believe in something.
Keep walking.
Wear a face mask. Mmm.
WILLIAMS: It's a brand that has existed for 200 years.
There have been so many global crises that have been thrown at the world,
the Spanish Flu, two world wars, Prohibition.
But Johnnie Walker has grown from strength to strength.
I believe that together the global community will overcome the crisis
and that we'll all emerge stronger.
The human desire to come together, to connect,
to socialize, to share stories,
to laugh, to cry, that will always exist.
CAPPADONNA: Just keep moving, keep walking that walk.
Everything don't got to be perfect. Know what I mean?
You just got to do the best that you can do.
Gotta keep walking, man, and it's good for your health.
[CHUCKLES]
[FULL STARCONTINUES]