What you'll learn by reading this article
- Why did Captain Morgan turn to conversational AI to connect with Gen Z?
- How did a Gen AI brand ambassador turn sampling tours and prize draws into CRM sign-ups?
- How did the assistant stay on brand while scaling from Great Britain to Kenya and Indonesia?
Client: Captain Morgan (Diageo) · Markets: Great Britain, Kenya, Indonesia · Service: Conversational AI
The brief: one million samples, and a lot of strangers
Captain Morgan set itself an ambitious target: to put its rum in front of one million consumers around the world. The plan relied on the kind of activity anyone who has survived a freshers' week will recognise, from student-union sampling tours and festivals to street teams, prize draws and out-of-home activations. Running alongside all of this was a headline product launch, a ready-to-drink can made in partnership with Pepsi MAX.
That launch carried real weight. Captain Morgan is Britain's number one rum brand and Pepsi Max is the top-selling zero-sugar cola, and the 5% ABV can was sold exclusively in Great Britain. Diageo was betting on a category it described as the fastest-growing part of the alcohol market, with RTDs up 25%.
But every sampling programme has the same blind spot: what happens after the drink. Someone enjoys a free cocktail at a pop-up bar, heads off into the night, and the brand never hears from them again. That is why Captain Morgan's brief had a fourth goal alongside reach, events and launches. It wanted to accelerate its digital engagement with Gen Z by capturing data, running lifecycle communications and keeping an always-on conversation going between the brand and the people it had just met.
The flagship of that sampling effort was Captain's Tours, a programme aimed squarely at university students. Captain Morgan turned student unions, bars and pubs into branded pop-up bars around key moments in the student calendar, from Freshers' Week to Halloween and Valentine's Day, with merchandise, giveaways and instant-win games to keep the energy up. A single venue could hand out around 3,000 samples in an evening. That is a lot of people meeting the brand for the first time, and a lot of goodwill to lose if the relationship ends when the bar closes.
The wins
Oct 2024
01
Launched in Great Britain
The Captain Morgan AI went live on the brand’s GB website as an always-on brand ambassador.
Oct 2024
02
Supported the Captain Morgan × Pepsi MAX collab
The assistant was the online home for the new Captain Morgan and Pepsi MAX ready-to-drink can.
Nov 2024
03
Powered a Co-op prize draw featuring Charli XCX
The assistant supported the Co-op prize draw activation, giving fans a way in through conversation.
2025
04
Rolled out to Kenya and Indonesia
Localised assistants and landing pages for each market, built on the same platform.
Why conversational AI made sense for this audience
Captain Morgan already saw itself as a digital-first brand, with web and social media at the heart of its marketing. The natural next step was to move from broadcasting at consumers to actually talking with them, and its audience was already used to that kind of exchange. Ofcom found that 16-24-year-olds were the most prolific adult users of generative AI in the UK, which means expectations have shifted. Young people now expect a brand experience to respond the way ChatGPT does, rather than offering a rigid menu of buttons and the occasional "Sorry, I didn't get that."
Those raised expectations come with a catch. In a 2024 Five9 survey of Gen Z consumers, nearly 60% said AI chatbots excel at fast, convenient service, yet 47% also found AI-powered solutions less trustworthy. For a global drinks brand, that leaves a narrow path to walk: the assistant has to be genuinely useful and unmistakably on-brand, and it can never wander off script. Getting all three right at once is exactly what makes this kind of project hard.
The solution: a digital brand ambassador
Voxly Digital built Captain Morgan a Gen AI assistant: a digital brand ambassador with the brand's "you be you" attitude built in.
It had three jobs.
Elevate the occasion. The assistant helps people explore Captain Morgan's flavours, cocktails, food pairings and occasions. Ask it what to make for a games night and you get a recipe, a snack pairing and a little personality. You don't get a PDF.
Be the online home for activations. Every campaign got a front door: the Pepsi MAX collab, sampling tours, festivals, street teams and prize draws.
Deliver real conversation. This isn't a decision tree in a pirate hat. It's a generative AI experience that understands slang, typos and emoji, and stays on brand while doing it.
The experience opens with four simple options that match what people actually want from a drinks brand: ask a question, find a cocktail, claim a free drink through the sampling programme, or shop. From there, people can type whatever they like. The cocktail finder suggests serves based on flavour and occasion and presents them as swipeable recipe cards, in a format that feels familiar to anyone who uses Instagram Stories. A built-in feedback form lets people who attended a sampling event tell the brand what they thought, giving the marketing team a direct line to the consumers it had just met.
“Voxly moved at a pace we rarely see. They took us from idea to a live Gen AI brand ambassador in around three months, and the technology simply worked: on brand, safe and genuinely engaging for our consumers. What set them apart was how they grounded every feature in real consumer insight and tied it straight back to our business plan, from sampling to CRM sign-ups.”
How it works: Inspire, Engage, Convert
The assistant sits at the centre of the user journey. Traffic arrives from social, paid digital, packaging and in-store, SEO, email and SMS, prize draws, and QR codes at sampling events.
From there, the conversation follows a simple funnel.
Inspire. Topical chat tied to the brand's media calendar. That means holiday season, summer BBQs, music and trends.
Engage. A brand expert on call. It runs a cocktail finder, recommends products ("what's best for me?") and answers FAQs about the world of Captain Morgan. It also lists sampling tour dates and venues near you.
Convert. Every conversation ends with a clear call to action: opt in to Captain Morgan's CRM, enter the prize draw, or buy through Diageo's online store, The Bar.
The goal isn't just to chat. It's to answer questions while steering people towards that call to action.
Because the welcome message is driven by the brand's 12-month marketing calendar, the assistant never feels stale. The same visitor might be greeted with summer BBQ ideas in July, Halloween party tips in October and gifting suggestions in December, each one opening a new conversation that leads naturally towards a sign-up or a purchase. And because every conversation is logged, the brand gets a running picture of what consumers are asking for, which flavours they lean towards and which occasions they are planning, insight that feeds straight back into future campaigns.
Built for a global drinks brand
A brand like Captain Morgan can't have a chatbot improvising. So the assistant runs on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
It answers from a knowledge base of brand-approved content, not from the open internet. That base includes recipes, product information, topical articles, tone-of-voice examples and safety rules. Diageo can see and sign off the source content behind every answer.
On top of that, an AI safety layer adds several levels of moderation. It keeps the assistant accurate, on topic and within brand and compliance standards.
The knowledge base was built from Captain Morgan's own material: content from the brand website and The Bar, a set of topical articles written with the brand's creative agency, a system header that sets out the Captain's backstory and safety rules, and tone-of-voice examples that teach the assistant how the brand actually talks. The result answers like a knowledgeable brand ambassador rather than a generic AI, and stays responsible about alcohol while doing it.
The assistant also had to fit into Diageo's existing technology, not sit alongside it. It went through Diageo's own staging environment and penetration testing before going live, plugs into the brand's analytics so performance can be tracked alongside the rest of the website, and passes opt-ins into Diageo's CRM so new contacts flow straight into the brand's lifecycle marketing.
AI as an opt-in channel
Here's where it clicked. For its 2025 activations, the AI became the digital landing page and the opt-in mechanic. That covered the Liquid on Lips sampling campaign, festivals and other out-of-home activity.
Someone at a sampling event scans a QR code and lands straight in a conversation. A few messages later they've found a cocktail, checked the next tour date and opted in to hear more.
That matters because sampling works. A study of over 78,000 post-trial consumer surveys found 82% of consumers highly likely to buy a product after trying it. A sample with no follow-up is a missed chance. A sample with an opt-in starts a relationship.
The conversational approach also gave the brand more flexibility than a standard sign-up page. The same assistant could support a sampling tour one week, a prize draw the next and a product launch after that, with each activation getting its own topical content and call to action without anyone building a new microsite. For the events team, that meant one QR code and one destination that always had something relevant to say.
Taking the Captain to Kenya and Indonesia
Great Britain was only the first port of call. In Kenya, we launched a localised Captain Morgan AI to support the brand's out-of-home activations and campaigns. The assistant became the digital home for what Captain Morgan was doing on the ground, so a campaign moment, an event or a poster could lead straight into a conversation. Fans get their sherehe (party) hacks, find the right serve for hosting their crew, and hear about what's coming next, while the brand keeps the relationship going long after the night is over.
We also launched in Indonesia, with its own localised assistant and landing pages on Captain Morgan's Indonesian website. Same brand ambassador, new market, and proof that the model travels.
Each market had its own designs, landing pages and copy, created for its local audience. Underneath, though, the platform stayed the same: the same knowledge base structure, the same safety layer and the same Inspire, Engage, Convert journey. That is what makes it practical to roll out to new markets quickly, as each launch builds on the last rather than starting from scratch.
What was on the roadmap
The programme was later discontinued following a restructuring, so the next phase never launched. Before that, roadmap sessions with the Captain Morgan team had mapped out how to take the assistant further, with the focus on distribution and putting it in more places people already are. The extensions considered included:
- QR codes on every touchpoint, including packaging, for free organic traffic
- More channels, extending the assistant to Instagram and Facebook
- Digital sampling inside the conversation, with samples sent to people's homes
- Branded content 2.0, with more recipes, gifting ideas and food pairings
- Branded games for in-venue fun and prize draws
Social channels were seen as the biggest opportunity. Captain Morgan has a large following on Facebook and Instagram, and taking the assistant to those platforms would have meant meeting people where they already spend their time instead of asking them to find the brand on the web. Digital sampling would have added a further layer: by targeting samples through social advertising, the brand could reach the right consumers more precisely than at a busy venue, track whether a sample led to a repeat purchase, and build lookalike audiences for future campaigns.
The takeaway
Captain Morgan didn't need another microsite. It needed a way to keep the conversation going after the free drink was gone.
A well-built conversational AI for marketing does exactly that. It turns one-off brand moments into ongoing relationships, at scale and on brand.
For Captain Morgan, that meant a single digital brand ambassador that could inspire people with cocktail ideas, support every major activation from sampling tours to prize draws, and turn a moment of interest into a CRM sign-up. Built on brand-approved content and Diageo's own systems, it launched in Great Britain and then travelled to Kenya and Indonesia. For any brand that relies on sampling, events or launches to win new fans, the lesson is simple: the conversation shouldn't end when the event does.
Want a brand ambassador that never clocks off? Talk to Voxly Digital.
