Phillips got the job and became part of a team – alongside Hugh Mitcalfe, who died earlier this year, Frank Newlands and the owners, Allan and Peter Shiach – that was determined to change that. The anecdote says much about the status of Macallan in those days: a blender’s malt, well-regarded on Speyside, little-known beyond its borders. I was very disappointed, because I thought: “Gee whizz, this job might not be what I thought it was.” So I asked the chap behind the bar and it was on the gantry – it was on optic.’Įarly work: The Macallan ads were foreshadowed by this beautifully made ‘brochure’ ‘I looked everywhere on the bar, but I couldn’t see it. The ad features no swirling glass, no hero bottle shot, no reference to whisky at all bar the mention of the Macallan name at the end.įorty years earlier, in 1978, Willie Phillips applied for a new job: that of managing director at Macallan. He recalls: ‘I stayed in Elgin overnight and thought I’d better go to the bar and ask for a Macallan so I knew a little bit about it before I went to the interview. In its scope, ambition and production values – not to mention its cost – it says much about a whisky that has evolved from farm distillery by-product to the world’s most lucrative single malt, a luxury lifestyle brand with a new, £140m distillery home. ‘Would you risk falling,’ the caption enquires, ‘for the chance to fly?’ Costing a reputed US$18m, Make the Call has as its centrepiece a 90-second video in which a shirtless man freefalls from a high mountaintop to his apparent doom, before sprouting wings and soaring triumphantly to safety.

Last year, Macallan launched a new global marketing campaign.

1980 macallan whiskey