France had been identified as a key growth market for Highland Park, but the brand needed more visibility and resonance with French whisky drinkers—particularly those familiar with single malts, but not yet loyal to Highland Park. Our brief: create and deliver a year-long paid social strategy to increase brand awareness, drive engagement, and ultimately contribute to sales success. With multiple objectives and a shifting landscape of platforms, audiences, and cultural cues, the challenge was to build a campaign that could flex, learn, and optimise without losing creative impact or strategic focus.

Working across Hydrogen’s paid, content and design teams, we built a creative framework around three pillars: product, serve, and occasions. This allowed us to create standout content with clear hooks—from origin stories in Orkney, to premium cocktail moments and seasonal highlights. We used a test-and-learn approach to refine everything: platform mix, content formats, audience age splits, creative variants. Regular reporting loops helped us adapt in real time, sharpen our spend and reach the audiences most likely to engage. It wasn’t about shouting louder—it was about showing up smarter.

Our paid campaigns delivered more than 16.5 million impressions, 750,000 engagements and 25,000 clicks to Highland Park’s own channels and retail partner sites. The initial success led to additional media investment mid-campaign, and by the end of the year, France had recorded its strongest-ever sales performance for the brand. What started as a single-market experiment proved Highland Park could drive not just awareness—but commercial results—with the right content, targeted delivery, and locally resonant creative. Strategic thinking met striking visuals, and the numbers did the talking.