Raising the Bar

Raising the Bar is Diageo's global campaign, and it came to India after lockdown to help partner restaurants and bars make a smooth comeback. Diageo already had 100+ partner venues.

What it needed was local awareness of those venues, and of what Diageo was doing to support them.

The campaign premise was Diageo's. Our contribution was matching it to what LBB already did well: local recommendations.

People came to LBB to decide where to go, so the most useful thing we could do for a venue coming back from lockdown was put it in front of people making that decision.

Make the venues the content, then scale what worked.

Edition one tested the approach: recommend the bars, invite people to remember them, and go live from inside them. Once it had beaten every commitment, edition two turned the approach into a programme of four video formats, each showing the venues from a different angle.

Edition 1 — prove the approach: city-by-city guides to favourite bars, a contest inviting people to share a memory from their local bar, and Instagram Lives with LBB Insiders from partner venues.

Edition 2 — scale it into a programme of four video formats, each giving partner venues a different kind of spotlight: an owner series on the people behind the restaurants and bars; Instagram Lives broadcast from the venues with a local influencer in each city; review and experience videos shot and edited with influencers; and cocktail videos with select bartenders making drinks, with a short "know your bartender" angle.