The Vault
The Brief
Turn every employee into a brand ambassador
As Diageo’s family of brands grows, the gap between the stories behind each brand and the people selling them widens. Employees across every function — from sales to marketing to customer service — need deep brand knowledge to represent the portfolio with confidence. The five-thousand-square-metre archive in Scotland can’t scale to a global workforce. Diageo needed a digital experience that could.
The Solution
Bring the archive to the screen
The Vault: an immersive interactive platform that takes employees on a journey of brand discovery through six digital rooms. From heritage stories to signature serves, innovation insights to campaign showcases — designed to build brand knowledge and the confidence to share it.
The Vault — Experience Trailer
Five thousand square metres of history. Not everyone can visit
Diageo’s archive is extraordinary — a vast repository of the stories, ideas, and craft behind some of the world’s most iconic drinks brands. Historically, the ‘brand dunk’ involved immersive on-site days at the archive.
But with a growing global workforce, that model couldn’t scale. And the cost of low brand knowledge was tangible: employees who couldn’t tell the story behind a brand couldn’t build the emotional connection that drives premium positioning. New joiners across all disciplines needed access to the same depth of brand knowledge, regardless of location.
Diageo tasked us with creating a digital equivalent: something that would do the archive justice, build brand builders, and launch with six global brands — Guinness, Smirnoff, Baileys, Gordon’s, Tanqueray, and Johnnie Walker.
Our Approach
Design the experience around exploration, not instruction
We translated the physical brand dunk into six themed digital rooms: Story Lounge for heritage and character, Growth Garden for societal impact, Campaign Cinema for brand films, Ideas Lab for innovation, Brand Library for data, and Signature Bar for serves and cocktails.
Users explore freely by brand or by theme. Quizzes at the end of each journey test and reinforce knowledge. The platform feels quintessentially Diageo — warm, confident, and built for discovery.
A CMS back-end allows additional brands and content to be added over time, with analytics capturing engagement data to evaluate and adapt the experience as it grows.
Experience Examples
Key Project Assets
Six-Room Digital Brand Platform
An immersive web experience housing Diageo’s brand stories, campaigns, innovations, and serves across six themed digital rooms — designed for exploration and discovery.
Brand and Theme Journey System
Structured learning pathways allowing users to explore by individual brand or cross-cutting theme, each culminating in a knowledge-testing quiz.
CMS-Driven Content Architecture
A scalable back-end enabling new brands and content to be added seamlessly, with analytics capturing engagement data for ongoing optimisation.
Impact
The Vault quickly surpassed its predecessor and became a priority destination for brand immersion, now integrated into Diageo’s employee onboarding journey with a global rollout underway.
Key Films
Project Insights
From archive visit to always-on immersion
The best brand experiences don’t lecture. They let people wander, discover, and connect the dots themselves. The Vault works because it recreates the feeling of being inside the archive — the curiosity, the surprise, the pride — without requiring anyone to book a flight to Scotland.
When a platform goes from internal tool to global rollout priority in six months, you know the approach is right. Brand knowledge isn’t built in a classroom. It’s built through stories worth telling.
Brand Journey Example
The Diageo Vault is looking great and has received really positive reviews so far. Thank you for your partnership over the last many months.
Lauren Barr, Learning and Development Specialist — Diageo
