Diageo set out to win the most competitive and emotionally charged moment of the year: the holiday season. While consumers face a flood of alcohol advertising, purchase decisions happen in high-intent moments—traveling to gatherings, ordering food, or selecting meaningful gifts. The challenge was not just awareness, but driving consideration, conversion, and new customer acquisition within one connected ecosystem.
In partnership with Uber Advertising, Diageo developed a full-funnel holiday program moving consumers seamlessly from inspiration to purchase. The campaign activated placements across Uber’s ads and offers ecosystem—including Journey TV, Journey Ads, Post-Checkout Ads, CRM, Homepage Billboards, Storefront Ads, and Offers—ensuring visibility from upper-funnel discovery through lower-funnel conversion.
The integrated strategy combined digital, social, experiential, and commerce touchpoints into a unified brand experience. A “design your own bottle” feature invited users to create personalized Don Julio gifts, turning passive exposure into active participation. A social influencer program extended the idea into authentic holiday storytelling via Uber Eats, while a live Bryant Park Winter Village activation brought the campaign into the physical world, reinforcing the “Gift One, Get One” message and driving immediate digital engagement back into Uber.
Rather than isolated placements, the campaign operated as a coordinated journey—capturing attention in ride, deepening engagement through interactive and social experiences, and converting through commerce-native offers.
Key objectives included delivering a full-funnel holiday presence, increasing share across tequila, whiskey, and vodka, acquiring new-to-brand purchasers, and demonstrating the effectiveness of a fully integrated marketing ecosystem.
Uber Advertising brought the campaign to life as a fully integrated, full-funnel ecosystem designed to guide consumers from awareness to conversion across digital, social, experiential, and commerce environments. Rather than treating placements as standalone tactics, Diageo activated every available format within Uber’s ads and offered a suite to build sustained visibility and momentum throughout the entire purchase journey.
Using first-party mobility and ordering signals, Uber identified high-intent holiday moments when consumers were most receptive to spirits discovery, including traveling to gatherings, ordering meals for celebrations, and shopping for meaningful gifts. These insights informed a coordinated rollout across Journey TV, Journey Ads, Post-Checkout placements, CRM, Homepage Billboards, Storefront Ads, and Offers, ensuring the portfolio maintained presence from upper-funnel storytelling through lower-funnel conversion.
A central creative throughline connected the digital and physical worlds. The playable “design your own bottle” experience invited users to customize a Don Julio gift virtually, transforming passive advertising into hands-on participation. That same spirit of personalization extended into the real world through a co-marketing activation at Bryant Park’s Winter Village. The live experience served as a physical extension of the playable, allowing guests to customize and engrave their own Don Julio brass cups, enjoy cocktails at a bar designed as a larger-than-life Uber Eats bag, and receive curated takeaways that included recipes, branded merchandise, and a QR code linking directly to the Uber Eats Diageo storefront. In both environments, consumers moved from creative engagement to tangible ownership, reinforcing the gifting narrative while driving immediate digital action.
Social influencer content amplified the campaign beyond Uber’s owned channels, demonstrating authentic holiday gifting moments through Uber Eats and reinforcing consideration at scale. High-attention in-ride formats and contextual post-checkout placements then converted that inspiration into measurable purchase behavior within the same ecosystem.
One of the primary challenges was executing an alcohol campaign responsibly while maintaining scale and creative ambition. Uber addressed this through deterministic age gating and context-aware targeting, ensuring brand-safe delivery without compromising impact.
What made the campaign unique was not any single format, but the orchestration. By activating every stage of the funnel and extending a single creative idea from screen to street, Diageo and Uber transformed holiday movement into a connected brand, social, and commerce experience that spanned digital and physical environments seamlessly.
The integrated holiday campaign delivered clear business impact, driving category leadership, accelerating portfolio growth, and converting seasonal intent into measurable sales.
At the center of the campaign, Don Julio emerged as Uber’s top-performing tequila brand in December, increasing category share by +4.28 points and growing gross bookings by 44% year over year. As the singular focus brand across the campaign’s highest-impact touchpoints—including premium in-app placements, interactive Playables, and custom social content—Don Julio was successfully positioned as the go-to holiday gifting spirit on Uber Eats.
Momentum went beyond a single brand. Always-on integrations drove sustained growth across Diageo’s broader portfolio with share surging +0.47 to 1.88- points year over year; reinforcing the campaign’s ability to influence multiple categories simultaneously.
