Johnnie Walker, which became a partner of Angel City Football Club in June 2021, teamed up with musicians Brittany Howard and Tia P to produce the club’s official anthem – the first original anthem for a US women’s professional sport team.
Kicking off our @weareangelcity partnership with ‘Running With The Angels’, the official hype anthem for the team strong enough to bring stadiums to their feet.
Listen to the angel’s anthem featuring @blkfootwhtfoot and @iamtiap https://t.co/KGg0FNRo0H pic.twitter.com/rmmPUvd2c3
— Johnnie Walker (@JohnnieWalkerUS) March 24, 2022
The anthem, titled ‘Running with the Angels’, is not only a club activation from the Scotch whisky brand, but also the first wave of marketing in its new ‘First Strides’ program: a brand initiative which launched in 2020 and seeks to fund people and organizations pushing culture forward.
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The objective behind the brand’s sponsorship of the ‘Running with the Angels’ anthem is to help Johnnie Walker connect and engage with Angel City FC fans: the club sold 16,000 season tickets in its debut season.
It was back on 14 June that Angle City FC announced ‘Jane Walker’ – the sub-brand symbol of Johnnie Walker’s commitment to gender equality – as the team’s exclusive spirits partner.
The partnership saw, from the Spring 2022 start of the NWSL, fans at the stadium able to purchase (while celebrating responsibly) custom Jane Walker and Johnnie Walker gameday cocktails.
The joint marketing is also producing an ACFC / Jane Walker content series that showcases the ‘firsts’ the team has achieved to-date: such as being the first National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) team in Los Angeles and the first majority women-founded, owned and operated pro-sports team.
The football club tie-up marked Jane Walker’s first sports partnership in its culture-led strategic commitment to women and gender equality and its iFundWomen project.
Jane Walker, originally released in 2018, is a product blended by the company’s first female master blender Emma Walker (no relation to the brand’s namesake) made with Scotch whisky from Cardhu (a Diageo owned distillery which boomed under the direction of Elizabeth Cummings in the late 1800s).
The Diageo-owned brand, like some of its competitors, has made several attempts to engage female and minority drinkers in recent years as the Scotch whisky and spirits space continues to diversify and the number of women drinking whiskey steadily increases.
Johnnie Walker, the self-described most popular Scotch whisky in the world’, is engaging women through its ‘First Strides’ program with recipients of the initiative’s grants chosen by a diverse panel of ‘Walkers’ which includes Kenya Barris, Sophia Bush and comedian Lilly Singh.
Angel City FC is a Los Angeles based soccer team with a female-led ownership team (that includes actor Natalie Portman) which launched its brand identity in mid-2021.
Other linked female and women’s football focused content from recent months have included:
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