Behind the April Fools: The Goonlivet

“You’ve got to find that little moment where people go, ‘Oh, I think this is real’.”  

Simon Joyce, CEO and founder and the team at Emotive, independent creative agency, has fooled everyone.  

This April Fools, Emotive teamed with Pernod Ricard’s The Glenlivet and Sydney cocktail bar Maybe Sammy to create a premium whisky brand ‘The Goonlivet’. Bringing together premium single malt scotch and the cultural phenomenon that is the goon bag, it’s a match made in heaven.

Australian entertainer Jimmy Rees also took to Instagram to join in on the fun by sharing an unboxing of the Goonlivet scotch.

Joyce challenged the cliched advertising image of men drinking whisky lounging in leather arm chairs, claiming people can drink whisky however they please – there is no right way to ‘livet’.  

Joyce: “It goes back to the strategy and the creative platform launched in 2022  - Obey the rules. Miss the fun. Hopefully we’ll get some real reaction from the Scotch purists going ‘What the hell, how dare you put a beautiful single malt 12 years in a goon bag...

“The strategy was to open up the closed-minded world of single malt whisky and appeal to progressive Australian drinkers by taking a stance against the unwritten rules of the category. And this idea nails it.” 

On the inspiration behind the campaign, Joyce said in terms of how Emotive respond creatively, they don’t always default to comms because it may not always solve the business problem.  

“We actually took the brief in COVID in 2020 and we agreed on that strategy – to rip up the rulebook of Scotch. There were 30,000 books on Amazon that tell you how to drink scotch - it's the most intimidating category," said Joyce.

“We landed the idea then, and our entire campaign was to quite literally launch the Goonlivet, then use all the reactions to drive the content. It wasn’t to be in 2020 but we continued on with the strategy and landed the idea 'Obey the rules. Miss the fun'. That rolled out with Anna Pacquin as our lead talent covering film and OOH, and successfully drove new audiences to The Glenlivet.”

“We thought maybe this is a chance to bring back the Goonlivet as the exclamation point of this campaign because our rights with Anna were running out in March.

"With strong equity established in our creative platform, we felt like we had earned permission to land The Goonlivet for April Fool's Day. And that is where the team at Pernod Ricard were absolutely brilliant, backing it in and collaborating at breakneck speed to make it happen."

Joyce and the team at Emotive participated in April Fools this year because it felt strategically right from their end.  

“The idea that we had built through phase one was the main driver - all the planets aligned.  

We’d iterated the campaign multiple times to line up perfectly to slam dunk an April Fool's Day moment that is so cohesive with everything we've been about. That was our driver.” 

The prank launched last Friday, with Emotive revealing the joke shortly after on April 1 via social media. 

Emotive had an overall comms strategy, partnering with specialist creative PR agency Poem to launch with partners Maybe Sammy and the Whisky Club first to build credibility, then expanded to Trade PR to also add to the legitimacy of the product launch.

The agency then went more mainstream with lifestyle media and Jimmy Rees on March 31 to drive mass reach and WOM.

To reveal the prank, Pernod Ricard, Emotive & Poem coordinated all owned touchpoints (website and EDM), launch partners, influencers, and media outlets who originally shared, to either send an update or pin a comment to their original posts.

The Goonlivet sparked memes and comments of those showing "disappointment" on discovering the truth.