When Wild Turkey creative director Matthew McConaughey sauntered across the Bennelong lawn in the Sydney Royal Botanic Gardens, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge providing an iconic backdrop, onto the veranda of a tiny wood cabin, it is fairly understandable to think we have reached peak woke as a business model.
At the beginning of the year, clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business Scott Galloway predicted 2019 would see “a lot of virtue signalling or a lot of woke as a business strategy”.
On his weekly podcast with journalist Kara Swisher, Pivot, Galloway said: “Seventy per cent of our elected officials in the Senate at least represent 30 per cent of the population; a lot of red states don’t have a big population, so politically, conservative values are overrepresented.
“But, economically, kind of progressives are capturing the majority of the income, so there’s a very smart ... If you just do the math, there’s a solid shareholder-driven business strategy in promoting and being very open about your progressive values.”
Think Nike with its Colin Kaepernick campaign, Gillette with its ad about toxic masculinity. In January Microsoft pledged $500 million for affordable housing in Seattle, while last year, Domino’s ran a “paving for pizza” campaign where it committed to fill potholes in 20 places around the US to ensure pizzas arrived undamaged by a bumpy ride.
Putting the more critical discussion about some of these philanthro-capitalistic activities to one side, let's return to the Garden’s lawn with a view.
McConaughey was in Australia to promote Wild Turkey’s With Thanks initiative, the company’s annual charity campaign. In the US it worked with disaster relief organisation Operation BBQ Relief to give thanks to emergency services nationwide.
Here, it teamed with travel start-up Unyoked, founded by brothers Chris and Cam Grant. The brothers design and build off-the-grid tiny cabins and then locate them in wilderness areas. The concept is for people to disconnect from day-to-day life and reconnect with nature.
The Reserve by Wild Turkey x Unyoked is the result.
McConaughey said he was proud to see the solar-powered, no-wifi cabin come to life after months of hard work from the Australian build team, who only used sustainable materials to ensure the cabin melded seamlessly with its natural surrounds.
He said: “I’ve always been in awe of Australia’s natural beauty. My hope now is that The Reserve by Wild Turkey x Unyoked cabin will inspire Australians to reconnect with nature as an antidote to the frenetic pace of life. I’m also proud that the cabin will form part of the Australian Wild Turkey With Thanks initiative that will support people and organisations who demonstrate unwavering conviction to preserving and protecting Australia’s great wilderness and wildlife.”
A percentage of proceeds from cabin bookings, as well as $1 from every bottle of McConaughey’s Wild Turkey Longbranch bourbon sold in November and December will be donated to Unyoked’s charity partner, the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife.
Chris Grant said working with McConaughey was a “true collaboration of minds” which reflected Unyoked’s philosophy that getting back to nature is an ancient remedy for modern times.
McConaughey said his main contributions were a curated selection of books and four cassette tapes of his favourite music. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Collection of Essays, The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius were included. His tapes were Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Talkin Timbuktu” by Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder and “Metamodern Sounds of Country Music” by American country music singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson.
McConaughey became Wild Turkey’s creative director in 2016 after his first visit to the distillery in Kentucky. His visit and meeting with the father and son distilling team of Jimmy and Eddie Russell forged the relationship. Through the course of a year and after 88 testing pints, McConaughey and Wild Turkey released his own bourbon, Longbranch. A rare, small-batch Kentucky straight bourbon refined with Texas Mesquite.
Wild Turkey says this is the first of a number of planned initiatives that will go towards conserving and protecting the environment.
There are many reasons to be cynical about these types of campaigns - more companies are finding ways to promote their products in conjunction with an initiative or campaign that boosts the social good, or improve the environment when it had been (some would argue should be) the job of governments to do so.
Companies have to tread carefully here. Is one good gesture being used to hide less flattering ones? Are these sorts of campaigns diluting the urgency for governments and other agencies to act responsibly? Is virtue-washing the new green-washing?
McConaughey has a long history of social endeavours. In 2008, he founded the just keep livin’ foundation, which runs programs on the importance of decision-making, health, education, and being active. It runs in 37 schools in 11 US states.
McConaughey told the crowd of journalists, sweating in the midday sun on that lawn with a view, he didn’t expect to change the world, but if he could – as Steve Jobs once said – put a dent in it, well that was a good thing.
The Reserve by Wild Turkey x Unyoked cabin will be housed on the Central Coast of New South Wales from early December.
