The Campaign

Hennessy X.O is a unique cognac with distinct tasting notes of fruit, spices, chocolate and oak. Director Nicolas Winding Refn illustrates them in the campaign video for Hennessy X.O as follows: Sweet Notes, Rising Heat, Spicy Edge, Flowing Flame, Chocolate Lull, Wood Crunch, and Infinite Echo. Building on these vivid and descriptive taste images, we wanted our audience to not just taste this exquisite drink with their own tongue. We wanted them to see it, feel it, smell it. For our event, we transformed a downtown Tokyo building into an enchanted otherworld, recreating the taste adventure of Hennessy X.O in seven separate rooms.

Creative Execution

The first of the two floors rented, hosted a common space with a bar, a mini-cinema, a dance floor and a live DJ at the turntables. The second floor was our magic maze through the Hennessy X.O taste adventure: The Hennessy Odyssey. Following the seven taste notes of Hennessy X.O, we divided this floor into seven rooms. Each of the seven rooms surprised the audience with a truly sensual experience. Sweet Notes: where colorful velvety fog gently wraps you in sweet perfumes. Rising Heat: a lonely desert. The sun disappears in mirage. Spicy Edge: where clinking glasses evoke bone-jogging explosions and cinnamon aromas. Flowing Flame: An inferno that blazes hot and cold. Chocolate Lull: Cross the chocolate marshlands by a shaky bridge that might collapse any moment. Wood Crunches: cut your way through aromatic thicket – a forest of oak and vanilla flavors. Infinite Echo: where reflections and sound perpetuate.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

As of July 15, media value of the event has exceeded 270 million JPY (2.6 million USD). While sales numbers are only published on an annual basis and cannot be evaluated for any month-on-month change since the event in May 2016, we can expect that the number of trade orders has risen since then: Half of our 300 VIP guests in the first night came from a trade and distribution background. To our client Moet Hennessy Diageo, this was an important gesture to their distribution partners (existing and potential), if not the most important B2B-marketing measure of the year.

To visualize the exclusiveness of the brand, we rented two floors of a building in downtown Tokyo and made the special occasion visible from outside (whoever dared asking for admission on the first night was invited to come back the second night, when the event space was open to the public). The first night of the event was our VIP night to which we welcomed renowned experts and tasters of spirits, sellers and distributors as well as social media influencers (Food/Drink-bloggers and Instagram-influencers with an audience of 1million followers or more). They shared their experience with a crowd that can be defined as young, curious and fascinated by the delicious pleasures of life.