Gaelic x World Cup 2026

Gaelic Amber Ale is one of Highland's flagship beers, but this campaign marked something specific: the return of Scotty, Highland's original mascot, as part of a brand refresh. The 2026 World Cup gave us a cultural moment to anchor the campaign. Football pub culture (the communal watching, the pint in hand, the noise and the crowd) is exactly the world Scotty and Gaelic belong in.

How do you introduce a revived mascot and a heritage beer into a contemporary World Cup campaign without it feeling like a nostalgia exercise? The answer was to make the nostalgia intentional and specific. Not vague retro aesthetics, but a precise visual reference point that has its own cultural logic.

Project Date: January 2026
My Role: Creative Direction / Casting & Model Direction / Styling Direction / Photography / Post
Production: 4 cast models · 6 background extras · wardrobe · on-location at Charlotte Street Pub
Creative Brief: Click Here

The Visual Territory

90s pub flash photography. Disposable cameras, direct flash, the slightly overexposed, color-saturated quality of photographs taken by people who were actually there — not photographers hired to document something. The brief in one line:

A disposable camera found behind the bar of a Scottish pub on the night Scotland qualified — developed thirty years later.

That distinction is the whole point. A 90s pub photo reads as evidence of a real night, not a brand asset. The intimacy of candid flash belongs to the people in the pub — which is exactly what World Cup viewing culture is about. And the aesthetic does the storytelling the copy doesn't: Scotty's return is never announced in words. It's felt in the nostalgia of the flash, the warmth of the crowd, the pint held up against a dark pub interior.

The Moodboard

Final Creatives / Part 1

The Key Aesthetic Decisions

The vintage flash look was engineered from both ends (in-camera and in post) because neither alone would have been enough.

Direct, undiffused strobe: Two bare strobes, no softbox, no modifier. The opposite of how commercial light is usually shaped. The harshness is the point: it replicates the flat, slightly overexposed quality of a real flash camera in a low-light room, where the technical need and the aesthetic choice aligned perfectly.

A flattened, faded, warm grade: Highlights and shadows compressed together to kill the deep blacks and blown highlights of contemporary photography, then contrast added back through a selective S-curve. Shadows lifted rather than crushed to black — the classic tell of an aged print, reading as time having passed. Amber and gold pushed into the midtones to tie the beer's own color into the warmth of the pub light.

The result is an image with punch that doesn't look modern: lived-in, not produced. Deliberately the opposite of polished lifestyle photography or flat, interchangeable sports-bar imagery.

Styling and casting for authenticity: Every model was directed on wardrobe before the shoot—complementary reds and blues, casual layers, the clothes people actually wear to watch a match—so the crowd read as real pub regulars, not a cast. Gaelic pints sit in nearly every frame, with Scotty's return carried quietly on the glassware rather than announced.

Final Creatives / Part 2

  • Teal shadow grading gives the photo that disposable feel alongside the direct bulb flash, S-curve, and faded blacks.

  • Direct bulb flash, flattening of highlights, then adding contrast through S-curve manipulation

  • Combination of over-exposed areas with flattening of highlights make the colors of the scene pop, including the Gaelic Amber Ale bottle.

  • A little bit more modern lifestyle lighting and editing for specific media placements and campaign diversification.

The Result

The shoot established a distinct pub-series visual identity Highland can extend to any future bar or pub environment: a reference point and a technical blueprint that didn't exist before. More broadly, it proved Highland's visual identity can hold more than one register: the clean still-life product work and the raw pub flash belong to the same brand, and the contrast makes both stronger. The series shipped across the brand's 2026 World Cup campaign on Instagram, Facebook, paid media, and print materials with a deeper library archived for ongoing Gaelic use beyond the World Cup window.

Since this campaign was implemented in early March, the sales of Gaelic Amber Ale across draught and distributed cans has increased by 22%, outpacing industry downtrends and historical company sales.