Introduction
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard is Ireland’s leading supplier of spirits and wines, and a producer of some of the world’s most well-known and successful Irish whiskeys. Led by Jameson, their brands are driving the spirit’s global renaissance. Jameson is the world’s fastest-growing Irish whiskey, experiencing 30 years of consecutive growth and hitting sales of 7.7m cases in 2019. Irish Distillers’ brands are exported to 130+ markets, with over 70 of those experiencing double or triple-digit growth.
Irish Distillers was formed in 1966 when a merger took place between John Power & Son, John Jameson & Son, and Cork Distilleries Company. In 1988, Irish Distillers joined Pernod Ricard, gaining access to unprecedented levels of investment and an extensive global distribution network. Since 2012, they’ve invested over €250m, doubling production and bottling capacity to meet global demand for their products.
Problem
Today’s leading brands now exist in two spaces, the physical and the digital. Their digital identity is an iconic part of who they are and how they’re represented, changing the very foundations of how they connect with customers. With their stories now being told through a digital lens, brands are waking up to the reality that everything not saved will be lost, putting their brand identity, history and heritage at risk.
In 2017, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard identified this very challenge. With ownership of so many leading names, the company wanted to preserve the digital presence of their historic brands – such as Jameson - and be able to review and take inspiration from these identities in the future. With an iconic brand such as Jameson (which is over 200 hundred years old!), a solution was required to capture, archive and preserve its extensive website and social presence.
Their specific aspirations could be broken down as follows…
Creating a bedrock for future growth
By archiving today’s brand iterations, Irish Distillers aimed to establish an infrastructure that would benefit the company’s future generations of leaders.
Preserving the digital output of Irish Distiller’s historic brands
The online presence of Irish Distillers’ valuable brands, such as Jameson, Midleton Very Rare and the Redbreast range, required a secure and scalable archiving solution.
Storing centuries of data just seconds away
Fully indexed and searchable, Irish Distillers’ brands’ extensive online history would be made accessible to internal stakeholders, and easily located.
Driving risk management initiatives further
Enabling the team to provide immutable digital evidence for when a product, patent, or brand message was marketed across digital channels.
Solution
In 2017, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard chose MirrorWeb’s Platform to create a lasting and scalable archive of its online brand history. MirrorWeb’s intuitive technology rapidly worked through Irish Distillers’ expansive online presence and created lasting storage of its brand websites.
All of this was stored in AWS S3 and built on a dedicated server infrastructure across multiple availability zones for the highest possible speed and stability, including a 99.99999999% uptime SLA. The archive was also indexed to offer full search capabilities using Elasticsearch, allowing Irish Distillers to look back with flexibility and efficiency across its brands’ online history, to help with future branding and marketing decisions.
Brands such as Jameson are incredibly valuable as they hold unique resonance and value within parts of modern culture. Fortunately, they're safe and secure on the MirrorWeb Platform with encryption in transit and at rest (and certification to ISO9001 and ISO27001). All of this is hosted in UK mainland data centres that are CESG approved and connected to the PSN.
Result
Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard are able to not only capture their digital presence as it evolves, but also evidence precisely when a product, patent, or brand message was marketed through their web and social channels. This helps the brand to more effectively manage future digital risk.
Following its adoption of the MirrorWeb Platform, Irish Distillers now benefits from the security and certainty this technology affords its valuable brands. Of chief importance to the company was the ability to not only preserve their brands’ online history and document their evolution, but to make key decisions in the present so they could benefit from these in the long term. Irish Distillers is proud of its brands’ histories (which stretch back over hundreds of years) and is keen to preserve these, as well as ensure that they evolve and take on new life for future campaigns.
"MirrorWeb is helping us preserve the Jameson Irish Whiskey digital presence with their archiving capability. Together, we’re ensuring that Jameson’s digital heritage is never lost and that our next generation of marketers can use the archives as a source of inspiration."
Jean-William Cousin, Head of Marketing & Sales Solutions
