20M views without traditional ads

Jack Daniel’s is not a brand short on fame. Yet fame, as marketers know too well, isn’t the same as relevance.

Somewhere along the way, particularly with younger UK audiences, that distinction started to matter. Over time, the brand’s Southern charm — once a source of cultural clout — took on the feel of something preserved: visible, iconic, but increasingly untouched.

For a brand historically entwined with music and moments, this slow fade into the cultural wallpaper was a risk it couldn’t afford to indulge.

In mid-2024, Jack Daniel’s appointed Five by Five as its UK digital and social agency. As of April this year, its influencer and social media arm TSA became the company’s first-ever dedicated influencer partner.

Instead of reinvention, the focus was re-entry through infrastructure: consistent storytelling, deeper creator investment and a new approach centring social.

Building from the middle out

“The biggest shift that we set out to achieve was to take their content from advertorial to editorial,” says Harry Foyle, founder and director of TSA. “Everything we considered for the narrative and creative was distilled from the research done in social, centred around the target audience and grassroots music.”

This research set the tempo: informing content pillars, editing choices, influencer casting and how each partnership would unfold. More than aesthetic, these changes were all part of re-coding the brand’s muscle memory.

One of the earliest beneficiaries of that new strategy was Jack Daniel’s partnership with the Music Venue Trust — a relationship dating back to 2020, but in need of renewed energy. Originally a symbolic alignment, the partnership had the potential to become something more impactful: a shared commitment to a struggling cultural infrastructure.

The UK had already lost a third of its grassroots venues in the previous two decades, and by 2024, the touring ecosystem remained lopsided, with major acts skipping large parts of the country altogether.

So Jack Daniel’s stepped in. The brand supported a multi-leg national tour featuring artists like The Hunna and Fickle Friends, routed deliberately through endangered venues in towns typically overlooked by the industry.

From Cardiff to Doncaster, these gigs embedded creators at every stop. They documented, shared, translated — building storylines that threaded music culture back to Jack Daniel’s identity and back into the feeds of an audience increasingly out of reach.

“Once selected, we leaned in with those influencers, co-created with them,” Foyle adds. “After all, they’re the target audience themselves and know it better than anyone.”

The numbers speak for themselves: 20 million organic views, a 5% lift in brand consideration among 18–34s and engagement more than doubled.

Relationships before reach

Beneath the public-facing campaign, a quieter layer of groundwork was unfolding — largely offline, and entirely by design.

“When we started working with Jack Daniel’s in 2024, we wanted to create a network of influencers who authentically aligned with the brand and had a captivated and engaged audience that matched our target audience,” explains Foyle.

Known as Friends of Jack, the work in building this relationship pipeline began informally. Tactical gifting, shared drinks, casual dinners — moments designed to observe chemistry rather than enforce alignment.

“We don’t enter into a commercial relationship with influencers until we are certain that there is a true fit,” says Foyle. “Authenticity is critical and we place more emphasis on that than we do on reach.”

Once the relationships were built, so too were the stories. TSA worked with creators to co-develop content arcs that felt instinctive to them, but structurally cohesive to the brand. They stayed close in orbit: checking in regularly, identifying new moments of support and ensuring Jack Daniel's’s presence never tipped into performance.

That same discipline extended to the media strategy. Instead of scattering budget at every upload, TSA worked with media agency Spark to create a more elastic model — holding fire until content showed signs of life, then amplifying the pieces that proved their worth organically.

“When we saw content performing really well and beating the algorithm, we would then put spend behind it to achieve further reach and engagement,” Foyle says.

It’s a measured approach in an environment obsessed with immediacy and yet, somehow, it made Jack Daniel’s feel more in the moment than it had in years.

Social at the centre, not the sidelines

There’s a familiar pattern with heritage brands: use social as a megaphone, then wonder why no one’s listening. In this case, the order was reversed. Five by Five and TSA treated social not as a mouthpiece but as a nervous system — a space where brand, audience, and culture had to co-exist, not compete.

Importantly, the approach didn’t mean shedding what made Jack Daniel’s iconic. Quite the opposite, as music has always sat at the brand’s core. What changed was the expression. The Music Venue Trust partnership helped reposition Jack Daniel's not as a nostalgic sponsor of scenes past, but as a present-tense contributor to the future of live music.

This wasn’t a case of “activating a cause.” It was showing up where it mattered, in ways that mattered. Creators began to reflect that relevance back to their audiences — and those audiences, in turn, started to see the brand not as a legacy staple, but a present-tense player.

A steadier kind of relevance

By becoming [Jack Daniel’s] dedicated influencer agency we were just able to place more time and focus to it. But the groundwork had been done well in advance,” says Foyle.

Jack Daniel’s didn’t change course for the cultural currency. It doubled down on what mattered, then adjusted its methods to meet the moment. It’s what separates a short-term campaign from an actual shift in how the brand behaves — and is perceived.

For heritage brands wondering how to regain their seat at the table without mimicking challenger energy, it’s a lesson in strategic restraint. In systems over stunts, and in building the kind of fluency that doesn't require translation.

This Jack Daniel's case study offers a preview of our upcoming deep dive "Return on Social: Why boards should care and what to do about it." The full report explores how social has evolved from an amplification tactic to the core of modern brand-building, featuring insights from brands like Oatly, Deliveroo and Organix. Look out for the complete deep dive later this month, where we'll share a 90-day action plan to transform your social strategy.

----------------------------------------

Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor.

‍