Overview

Taylor’s came to Phipps with a brief to help amplify its 2023/2024 PORT SEASON advertising campaign all about creating Port moments all year round. 

Key to success would be targeting a younger audience and to focus on its flagship Taylor’s Late Bottled Vintage 2018 in the crucial pre-Christmas trading period for the Autumn/Winter Season and at Easter for the Spring/Summer Season.

Phipps created a highly impactful and engaging influencer campaign, ‘Pass the Port’ to bring Port Season to a new audience. By recreating this tradition in a social space, we created a new cultural moment for passing the Port. 

A simple concept, but extremely effective!

Challenge & insight

Port has seen declining market share in recent years as consumer tastes and buying habits change. While it remains popular among older wine drinkers and connoisseurs, the next generation of wine lovers is in the dark when it comes to these rich, layered wines that match brilliantly with food.

The overall creative concept of Pass the Port comes from the tradition of passing the Port to the left. Many of us can remember formal dinners when we’ve done this, but we wanted to create a new fun take on passing the Port and establish it as a cultural forward moment with a younger audience as a way to help future-proof the category.

Christmas is a key trading period for rich ruby and vintage styles of Port, but we wanted to encourage consumers to consider it at different times of the year. 

So, whilst the Christmas campaign focused on the ruby style of Port, for Easter, we mixed it up and talked about different styles including chilled white.

Strategy & approach

With these insights in mind, we developed a hugely fun and engaging influencer marketing campaign involving content creators across the drinks, food and lifestyle spaces, with each posting a reel of how they serve Taylor’s Port their way and then passing the Port (literally) to the next influencer. Simple, yet effective!

Working with influencers operating in different spaces allowed us to reach a new and younger audience and was a highly effective way to enhance visibility and advocacy for Taylor’s. 

 The aim was to drive awareness and sales of Taylor’s Ports in the crucial pre-Christmas shopping period and beyond, by reaching a younger, social-media savvy audience. 

Campaign

We identified eight content creators across food, drink and lifestyle, based on audience figures, engagement scores and content style to collaborate on both campaigns. Phipps uses influencer marketing data platform, Klear, to select content creators with high true engagement scores who will deliver the results we need for our clients.

They were briefed to showcase their favourite Port and food pairings in a reel, becoming part of a sequential chain celebrating the tradition of passing the Port to the left around the table. The influencers all posted at the same agreed time, each tagging the next creator in their post so their audience could follow the chain and get inspiration for how to serve Taylor’s Port over the festive period and at Easter.

The beauty of this campaign was the way each reel was unique to each content creator, giving the content authenticity.

We also created a compilation video of all the reels which ran as a creative, with paid media spend targeting wine lovers, to amplify the campaign on Taylor’s owned channels.

Results

Overall, the campaign in total reached 408k consumers at a cost of per reach of £0.10. Really interesting was that the Easter campaign outperformed Christmas (per influencer) with really strong engagement figures (501 at Christmas vs. 874 at Easter) indicating a growing appetite for Port in Spring/Summer one of our key objectives. 

‘We’ve been working with Phipps on our first foray into influencer campaigns for Taylor’s Port, starting with a ‘Pass the Port’ Christmas campaign. Phipps choice of influencers, proposal and content briefing was very effective and delivered strong results, so we came back for more with an Easter campaign this year!’

Bryonie Grieveson, Fortified Wine Commercial Manager, Mentzendorff