This post was created in partnership with Johnnie Walker
Maintaining relevance today requires more than great products; it demands showing up in market with creativity, intention, and the right partners.
During a Brandweek 2025 session co-hosted with Johnnie Walker, Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at ADWEEK, sat down with Josh Dean, VP of Johnnie Walker and Buchanan’s North America. Throughout their conversation, Dean unpacked the 205-year-old Scotch brand’s winning marketing formula, how it’s been able to connect with a new generation of customers without losing sight of its roots, and walked the audience through the brand’s bold, culture-first collaborations.
Reframing the concept of a heritage brand
Rooney opened the chat by asking about the recent 25th anniversary of Johnnie Walker’s “keep walking” tagline—an iconic campaign that the company maintains as its centerpiece.
“This is a heritage brand,” said Dean. “But we think of it as a brand with heritage. ‘Keep walking’ started in a very different time: 1999. It was the era of MySpace—it was pre-Facebook—and mobile phones were just coming online. But when we launched it, it very quickly became this rallying cry around progress.”
Since then, he continued, the phrase has served as a North Star for the company in terms of how they show up in culture: by producing creative campaigns that tell the story of both movement and adaptation. “You can’t stand still,” he said. “You constantly need to reinvent what it means.”
Creating culture, not borrowing it
The brand’s progressive vision is clear in its choice of collaborators. Finding the right talent to align with Johnnie Walker is an extremely intentional process, Dean shared, to ensure the messaging feels engaging, and most importantly, authentic. “We’re very clear that we don’t borrow from culture,” he said. “We’re not led by culture. We identify and collaborate with the individuals who are shaping culture.”
Two recent campaigns perfectly illustrate these culture collaborations: a 360 product, media, and event activation in Times Square for Squid Game 2 with Netflix and a release under the luxury Johnnie Walker Vault line with then-Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing.
Dean explained that the brand thinks of partnerships and launches from almost a “surround-sound perspective”—creating fresh ways for new customers to engage with the product lines that integrate into the cultural touchstones in music, sports, and fashion that already spark natural interest and excitement. He also stressed that winning in the cultural space hinges as much on timing—choosing the right partner at the right moment—as fit.
Prioritizing brand meaning over product placement
Identifying collaborators with stories that can imbue a deeper meaning to the final creative is another part of Johnnie Walker’s carefully calibrated process.
