Harrison Ford sits warming his Trossachs by an open fire. He’s in Scotland reviewing the script for a new advertising campaign for Glenmorangie. His disdain is apparent. “The icon,” he snarls, reading the introduction. “Top of the mountain” also goes down badly with Ford. “Bagpipe players” leads him to screw up the script and throw it into the fire.

“Never in a million years,” Ford concludes.

A second later we hear the pipes, see the octogenarian movie star atop a mountain, in a kilt, at sunset, holding a bottle of Glenmorangie and looking – it has to be said – impossibly handsome.

The latest campaign from Glenmorangie is quite the endeavour. Helmed by Aussie actor Joel Edgerton and set in and around the brand’s highland home, it’s a campaign that bucks the mystical and mystifying trend of whisky brands rejecting their Scottish roots in favour of brutish, abstract modernity.

We follow Ford as he heads to Scotland, meets the makers of the fine stuff, dons a kilt and generally stumbles around a bit before invariably dropping into a warm chair near a decent fire and very responsibly enjoying a wee dram. At some point towards the end of each of these 60-second adventures Ford pauses, crinkles, looks at his half-empty glass and delivers the word “nice” with such dusty insouciance I defy you to try a glass of Glenmorangie and not do the same.

Ford, for once, is allowed to be Ford. Or as close to the fabled star’s real personality as we are ever likely to see. He is apparently a proper whisky drinker. And his usual bad-tempered, exhausted aura is softened in these ads with what appears to be genuine affection for the brand and the people around it. One of the joys of the ads is working out how much of Ford’s appreciation of what he encounters is simply good acting and the motivation of a big, fat endorsement cheque, and how much is genuine pleasure at the state of it all.

The ads were filmed over three days last summer when Ford visited Glenmorangie’s Tain distillery about 10 miles north of Inverness. The campaign is structured around 12 long-form episodes and a hero film. Presumably print, digital and other assets will follow.

Consumers don’t get tired of ads, only marketers do

Familiarity breeds effectiveness

And other than Ford’s enigmatic performance, the timing of this campaign is where things get interesting. Glenmorangie is quite a big brand in whisky. And as part of the Moët Hennessy stable of luxury it certainly has access to deep pockets. But a star of Harrison Ford’s stature and this kind of very high-end, long-form video execution are way, way above what you would normally expect from a brand of Glenmorangie’s size – or, frankly, any other whisky brand.

But the team at Glenmorangie have grasped something. Something important which is changing the cadence, budgets and planning of many big brands. And it all – appropriately, given Glenmorangie is a master of aging – comes down to patience.

For as long as there has been big brand advertising, campaigns have been launched and then replaced on a semi-annual basis. For big FMCG brands it’s not unusual to run two or even three big new bursts of creative each year. Slower-metabolism brands in B2B or categories like insurance will usually default to at least one new big creative launch per year. But rare is the brand that gets to October without clear plans for next year’s big new campaign.

If you had a great ad running in 2020 it is, all things being equal, still going to be great.

Marketers launch a new ad campaign and the thoughts of the organisation turn almost immediately to what is next. And there used to be some empirical support for this approach in the form of ‘wear-out’. Every dodgy textbook from the 1970s onwards has a section that shows how a new ad takes several exposures to work properly (the wear-in) and then how overexposure to the same ad causes a decreasing level of effectiveness that can eventually even result in a negative response (wear-out).

Of course, that last paragraph is mostly balls. The main reason for new ads was much more basic than institutional habit or the tentative theory of wear-out; most of it was down to marketers. Marketers who think their main, perhaps only, function is communications and who therefore need to produce ads as much as possible. Missing the effectiveness forest for the excitement of a new advertising tree, marketers think their role is advertising production, so that’s what they do. Over and over again. And that means 20% to 30% of a typical marketing budget is going on creative execution rather than the media investment required to carry that execution to the market.

But during 2024 it became increasingly apparent that you did not actually need to change your ads so frequently. The concept of wear-out had been built from highly specious experimental research conducted decades earlier. New research from the likes of Analytic Partners, System1 and Kantar all points to the same thing: that an ad’s effectiveness and its age in market are entirely unconnected. If you had a great ad running in 2020 it is, all things being equal, still going to be great. In fact, bedding it in with audiences for a few years and allowing it to become familiar might even make it more effective.

Kantar made this point beautifully with its analysis of the best UK Christmas ads. Sure enough, the winners tended to be ads run in previous years. And the losers, for now, were new ads launched as part of a new campaign for Christmas.

Consistency pays off as Aldi and Coca-Cola top Christmas effectiveness rankings

‘Three-year business case’

There are a couple of important caveats here. As I like to remind clients, if you have a shit ad it’s going to stay a shit ad. And there are ads that just need to be pulled because the content – in the form of the product or the price – becomes outdated. There’s also a question about whether the same long-standing effectiveness applies to more performance-based fare.

But for the big brand-building epics, if you get a winner, stay with the winner. Look at poor Coca-Cola: every year it makes a hot new ad. And every year it gets smashed in the consumer ratings and effectiveness measurements by ‘Holidays Are Coming’. Old keeps working. And working better than new. The exact opposite of what we used to think.

Why it Works: Coca-Cola’s Christmas trucks should keep rolling

And that’s why Harrison Ford is on top of that mountain in his kilt. To do such things for a six-month campaign would be beyond the budgets of all but the biggest brands. But Glenmorangie has done something very smart here. The marketing team has read their effectiveness handbook, worked out that they can not only get away with creative for multiple years but probably benefit from it, pulled all their creative budget forward into 2024 and filmed an amazing campaign with a global superstar.

And now they are going to run that campaign for three, probably five, years and put all their money into the working capital of media. Tellingly, while 12 ads were made during Ford’s visit, only six will be released this year.

The shared importance of creative and media does not mean you need to balance them every year.

“Marketers often talk about creating cut-through by doing fewer, bigger, better initiatives – but doing this is challenged by annual budgeting and fixed marketing investment rates,” Glenmorangie’s impressive CEO Caspar MacRae explained during the launch briefing last week. “Instead of annual planning, we partnered with finance to build a three-year business case, allowing more up-front investment in creative development and then balancing the media spend over three years.”

MacRae is not the first to cotton on to this ‘spend now, share longer’ approach to communications. In 2022, Tourism Australia’s CMO Susan Coghill went large on a major new animated campaign to promote Australia to the world’s tourists. Plenty of pre-testing, big-budget animation, Hollywood stars and a shit-ton of assets went into it, and they are still sweating away four years later on a TV screen somewhere on the planet as I write this.

There’s a hoary old marketing debate about whether creative or media is the more important factor in driving effectiveness. Like most of these ‘debate’ topics, it can be answered quickly and with Fordesque derision with the usual Bothist answer. But the shared importance of creative and media does not mean you need to balance them every year. The emphasis you place on these two essential elements might be something worth considering.

Make fewer ads. But make better ads. Spend more. Test them in advance. Take bigger risks and dream bigger narratives. Then resist the temptation to do ‘new’ and sweat that beautiful asset for as long as you can. ‘Holidays Are Coming’ is in its 15^th year. Fuck knows how long Harrison will spend up that mountain. The cadence of advertising is changing. And the results could be… nice.

Mark Ritson teaches marketing communications as one 10th of his acclaimed Mini MBA in Marketing course. The next cohort starts in April.