The sales were in one province.
The audience was in another.
Henry, Tayler and Ries handed us Old Buck Gin ahead of the Heineken merger and kept us on it for sixteen months. It started as an audit. It finished with us running everything the brand put out.
How the scope moved
It started as an audit. It ended as the brand.
Audit & strategy
The category and brand audit, then the strategy built off it. The finding that moved the spend came out of this, in week one.
Social
A feed of pack shots rebuilt into a content operation, with a follower rate committed in writing before any spend.
Events
Two owned properties — New Contenders and Spirit of Champions — and six tour dates across three provinces.
The whole brand
Acting lead on everything the brand put out, working the outlets alongside the client’s trade team.
Outerbounds was never appointed lead agency, but handled most of the roles of one. The scope grew to that shape because each piece worked and the next one was handed over. That is what a standing engagement looks like from the inside, and it is why rung 03 is priced as a relationship.
01 · The audit
One finding, in the first week.
Everything after this followed from a single line in the audit. The brand was spending where it was already winning, and had nothing left to take there.
From our audit, 2021
“The brand has the major bulk of its sales in the Eastern Cape yet the ideal audiences on social media lie in Cape Town and Johannesburg.”
02 · What we took over
A page nobody was listening to.
Feeds were pack shots. No influencer work at all. Reach came from competition ads and nothing else. No YouTube. No theme holding any of it together.
What we committed to, before a rand was spent
R10 per new follower. R200,000 of ad spend to grow the page by 20,000 targeted followers over six months — written into the strategy document first, and then delivered against.
The same discipline as the Hunter’s Sound Tour reach target: the number goes on paper before the work starts, so the result can be checked.
03 · What we did
We went where the brand was not.
Moved the spend
Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Not the Eastern Cape, where it was already winning.
Built buyers outlet by outlet
Alongside the client’s Head of Trade Marketing and his team, on-consumption venue by venue.
Joined the chain
Strategy fed the campaign, the campaign fed the social, the social fed the physical activation, and the trade team took all of it into off-consumption.
And we built the brand its own properties: New Contenders and Spirit of Champions.
04 · What came back
Smallest page in the category. Most of the noise.
Facebook “Pages to watch”, one week — Old Buck against the category leader
Belgravia had 286,600 page likes and 29 engagements that week. Old Buck had 13,200 likes and 10,300 engagements.
Twenty-one times the audience, and almost nobody in the room was listening. This is the number we lead with, because it is ours, it is measured, and it is the one the screenshot shows.
Where the reach landed: Cape Town 20.3%, Johannesburg 12.4%, Pretoria 9.3%, Durban 7.6%. Every one a market the brand was weak in. The Eastern Cape, where it was already strong, is not on that list on purpose.
Old Buck is the bottom row. Belgravia is the top one.
The result the brand reports
Old Buck moved from #5 to #2 in its category — second only to Gordon’s, and against a competitor spending many multiples of its budget.
That is the brand’s own number, confirmed by its Head of Trade Marketing, who came to it from Coca-Cola and SAB. It is a sales and distribution position, measured by the client. It is a separate claim from the social figures above and the two are not combined.
05 · The owned properties
We put the brand behind four acts. None were in the top twenty.
New Contenders
Three provinces, three artists, six dates, and a line-up cast on who was about to matter. Shimza came in as a value add on the first tour date — that is what the position buys you.
From our own report at the time: MusiholiQ at 16 on the charts. Umlando at 7. MJ at number 1. Bravo Le Roux picking up multiple RUMA awards. None of them were in the official top 20 when the tour started.
Shimza, first tour date.
A winning alternate serve, shot in a hired venue.
Spirit of Champions
“You don’t have to be a boxer or a musician to win with Old Buck.” That line is lifted straight off the ad. It opened the brand out from athletes and artists to the people actually drinking it.
We advertised for aspiring mixologists on stories, shot their Perfect Serve and an Alternate Serve alongside it, then handed it to everybody else — a public competition to build an alternate serve, with entrants’ own content running on the brand’s feed, reformatted to hold the look. It completed, with a named winner.
And we sat with the winners and asked what they had come through to get there. One had lost his father, then his brother, and finished his first national tour anyway. We let him tell it, and we did not put a bottle between him and the camera.
06 · The heritage
The brand was sitting on a boxing dynasty and not using it.
Between the seventies and the eighties the Old Buck Belt was the prize in South African boxing. The brand still owned that, and none of it was anywhere in the marketing when we took over.
We put the heritage and the present in the same frame and let the audience join them up: the belt on one side, the artists carrying the culture now on the other. Same brand, same claim about winning, sixty years apart.
The belt itself. Gold buck’s head, engraved boxer plates, the crest.
07 · Why somebody has to be inside the brand
Mike Tyson brought it up on his own show. A customer told us first.
A consumer messaged the page. He had watched a ninety-minute podcast, recognised the reference, and came to tell the brand — unpaid, with the minute mark. We were on the inbox and answered the same day, then went and watched it.
Tyson raised the Old Buck Belt while the room was working out what the most prestigious belt for an African title fight should look like. Inside a month it was a campaign concept in front of the client. It was never taken forward.
A listening tool is a licence fee anybody can buy. An audience that hands you something, an inbox somebody is actually reading, and a team that turns it into a concept in weeks is a different thing.
Straight into the brand’s inbox, with the timestamp.
What the client said, a year later
“Outerbounds gave the brand content that it had never seen before. A particular highlight for me was the New Contenders Spirit of Champions content… Devon and his team consistently found ways to humanize the brand with content.”