How Collabs Keep Johnnie Walker Moving Forward

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.

Finding invested partners like Rousteing, Dean said, has been more valuable than a simple product placement relationship. “Olivier was so inspired by ‘keep walking’ because of his own journey. He’s had a very difficult journey himself. He interpreted ‘keep walking’ as ‘keep walking until you fly.’ And that’s how he spoke about it. It was just so special to be part of that with him.”

In some cases, talent will approach the brand with ideas because they want a symbiotic narrative-driving relationship. “It has to feel reciprocal and that there’s a meeting of the minds and the hearts that can build both brands forward,” he said, calling out the brand’s partnership with entertainer Sabrina Carpenter for the Man’s Best Friend album launch as an example. 

“Once you establish that, it comes back to creativity. With Sabrina, we knew how we wanted our brand to show up, and she knew very well how she wanted her brand to show up, and then we put the teams together and allowed the magic to happen.”

Balancing creative and commerce

The discussion concluded with a question from the audience about strategies for securing buy-in from in-house finance teams for such high-production, high-concept ideas.

Dean replied that though he showed a short teaser of the Carpenter campaign, their overall collaboration is a two-year program with an end-to-end plan that pulses out in waves to allow for long-term ROI, not just surface saturation.

“Any good marketer will tell you you’ve got to keep one eye on the short term and one eye on the long term,” he continued. “It’s about: How do we both bring excitement and new consumers into the brand, but also make sure that there’s a commercial runway bringing that to life?”