Sailor Jerry is a relatively new rum in the UK. Our job was to help grow the brand but in a way that maintained its underground appeal. We knew our audience hated being marketed to. So it was critical to avoid going mass market and appearing to sell out. The story of Sailor Jerry was already all over the internet. So instead of creating a website full of the expected marketing tricks, we looked to harness the real story, written by ordinary people.

Small space ads in The Big Issue and banners on LastFM invited people to “Discover the Spirit of Sailor Jerry” for themselves. These all led to sailorjerry.co.uk

On the website, we created a ‘frame’ and a navigation bar in the style of a Sailor Jerry tattoo. This allowed users to pull in selected Sailor Jerry content from all over the internet without ever leaving our site. We also added content of our own in social media channels (such as YouTube) and a few pages on the product itself. And we further brought the brand to life by sponsoring The Big Chill festival.

We hosted a competition on LastFM that invited people to submit a Sailor Jerry music playlist and created a Big Chill band recommender. Everything encouraged people to sign up so we could stay in touch with news and promotions.