When Domaine de Canton approached Leap Group, they had a refined ginger liqueur with standout ingredients—but little visibility in a cocktail culture dominated by spritz trends and social-ready spirits. Past marketing efforts hadn’t fully captured its unique appeal, so we set out to reintroduce this premium brand to a modern audience in search of something new.
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Raising the Bar:
How We Crafted a Winning Cocktail Campaign for Domaine de Canton
Domaine de Canton is a sophisticated ginger liqueur handcrafted in France, using only hand-sourced ginger, pure Provencal honey, and hand-selected Tahitian vanilla beans, with no preservatives, additives, or colorants of any kind. It’s the perfect cocktail ingredient for today’s discerning, health-conscious, and globally oriented consumer. But the problem was, those upscale drinkers were too busy drinking Aperol Spritzes to take notice of this premium French liqueur.
That’s when parent company Heaven Hill Brands called on Leap Group to help. We’ve been crafting highly effective, award-winning creative campaigns for multiple brands within their portfolio since 2016, including Admiral Nelson’s, Deep Eddy Vodkas, Hpnotiq, and Lunazul. So, we leveraged our deep spirits expertise to develop a digital campaign that would drive awareness, engagement, and trial for Domaine de Canton during the summer months.
A Refreshing Approach to Creative
To introduce spritz enthusiasts to the Ginger Spritz and other bespoke Domaine de Canton cocktails, our campaign would position the liqueur as a must-have for summer occasions such as brunches, happy hours, and date nights. Our visually captivating creative would be tailored for social platforms Meta and Pinterest, using highly targeted audience segmentation to ensure our messaging reached the right people on the right channels at the right time.
To achieve the scrolling-stopping visuals we would need to catch our audience’s attention, we captured stunning new lifestyle and drink photography for the campaign on location at Nostalgic, an upscale restaurant and cocktail bar in Louisville, Kentucky. Against the elegant mid-century ambiance of Nostalgic, we photographed a diversity of talent to create authentic scenes that resonated with the audience’s desire for bespoke luxury and individual expression.
The imagery reflected DDC’s luxurious yet approachable brand identity, emphasizing culture, luxury, and the joy of fine drinking. Then, we supplemented the visuals with recipes for the Ginger Spritz, Gold Rush, Ginger Collins, Ginger Margarita, and Canton Breeze cocktails, supported by dynamic visual elements such as vertical assets, short video clips, and recipe cards designed to encourage engagement and shares.
Custom Mixology for Each Social Platform
Now that we had our creative assets, we optimized the campaign for Meta and Pinterest, leveraging the unique strengths of each platform. For example, with Meta, we focused on placements such as Facebook Feed and Instagram Reels, which drove the highest impressions and engagement. Dynamic elements like group toasts and gender-neutral creative helped connect with a younger, male-skewed audience. Meanwhile, for Pinterest, we aligned our campaign with trending themes like “date night” and “celebrations,” and featured mood board-style visuals. Recipe pins with simplified recipe cards encouraged users to save and share the content.
Achieving Ginger Spritz Gold on Meta and Pinterest
The campaign quickly achieved impressive results on both platforms, confirming both our creative and media approaches. On Meta, we generated more than 12M impressions and more than 11.5K total engagements with an above-benchmark 9.65% engagement rate. Our Spritz & Collins Recipe ad creative garnered 4.48M impressions, the highest among all creatives, and drove significant engagement. The youngest segment of our audience (ages 21-24) responded strongly to dynamic content like Instagram Stories and Reels, while males accounted for 60% of impressions and 56% of clicks (marking a departure from Meta’s typical female-dominated engagement).
The Results | Pinterest
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Over on Pinterest, the campaign achieved an impressive 2.7M impressions and, with a click-through rate of 1.02%, outperformed Meta in driving direct engagement. Our Margarita & Spritz Recipe ad creative captured 75% of total impressions and 80% of clicks, solidifying its appeal across audiences. Here, females drove the majority of engagement, accounting for more than 2M impressions and dominating outbound clicks. By tailoring our content to the specific platform, we were able to tap into Pinterest’s mood board-style preferences with visuals themed around date nights and celebrations, which resonated deeply with our audience.
Though our bespoke French liqueur didn’t have the super-size budget that Aperol did, we successfully converted many of its fans into Domaine de Canton consumers in a single summer through our own proprietary cocktail of platform-specific strategies, consumer insights, and visually engaging content that truly resonated with our audience—and had our client saying “Ooh la la!”
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