Bushmills Buddies Up With Old Friends

A toast at the Bushmills USA launch party. Photo by Diana Levine.

As anybody who reads this site knows, companies and artists are constantly trying to find innovative ways to link up. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t, but the most important element in any deal, for both parties, is comfort.

On Monday, the Irish whiskey maker Bushmills threw a party to celebrate the launch of “Since Way Back,” a new marketing campaign that associates their brand with several groups of friends that also happen to be big names in New York’s dance music scene.

It’s an unusual move for all parties – a real friendship as a marketing tool? – but after a quick chat with Jonathan Galkin, the co-founder of DFA Records and one of the campaign’s subjects, it starts to make sense.

Galkin is not exactly a seasoned spokesman. Ever since he co-founded DFA Records with James Murphy back in 2001, Galkin has stayed behind the scenes, opting to let Murphy, the mastermind behind LCD Soundsystem and many other iconic dance-punk releases, do whatever talking was necessary. So what, aside from a real appreciation for single malt scotch, could convince him and his friend Justin Miller to become faces in a national ad campaign?

“It was non-celebrity oriented,” he says.

“And,” Galkin continues, “Justin [Miller]‘s so good-looking they really had no choice.”

Despite the presence of MTV favorites Chromeo on the campaign, Galkin’s on to something. Marketers used to get band-brand partnerships wrong. In most cases, agencies would try to turn an artist’s song into a vehicle for some kind of fantasy, or some suit would try to slap a coat of sparkle (or, in the late ’60s, some soap) onto a musician’s image, or both.

Jonathan Galkin at the Bushmills USA party. Photo by Diana Levine.

These days, the companies have learned to back off.

“They step back enough where we’re still comfortable in the creative space,” he continues. “They’re not breathing down our necks.”

In the old days, marketers were wary of plunking down dough without strings attached, worried that what they’d get back would be indulgent and unsellable. But in an era of dwindling budgets and record sales, when artists are happy to have access to any kind of extra revenue, both parties approach the partnership in good faith.

“I really haven’t heard of any situation, honestly, where [a sponsor] said, ‘This is not good enough,’” Galkin says.

This mutual respect didn’t come out of nowhere, of course. All it took was artists realizing that they could earn respect as well as money for this kind of work, and Galkin has a somewhat biased opinion on what made this possible. “45:33 changed the game,” Galkin smiles, referring to James Murphy’s best-selling workout mix for Nike that earned huge amounts of critical praise.

That assertion can be taken with a grain of salt (an equally high-profile pairing, DJ Shadow’s Funky Skunk mix for Obey, came out two years before 45:33). But now that brands are becoming more sensitive to bands’ concerns, and bands are more amenable to corporate patronage, Bushmills’s collection of old friendships may help forge plenty of new band-brand friendships down the road.

Tagged as: bushmills, Editor's Pick, marketing, Success Stories