ARCHIVEJohnnie Walker Rewrites Bossa Nova History With Errata at 88
Errata at 88 is a 2024 Johnnie Walker campaign, created by AlmapBBDO in São Paulo, Brazil, that corrected the decades-long erasure of bossa nova pioneer Alaíde Costa from music history by publishing a 70-year errata in a major Brazilian newspaper and sponsoring her debut performance at Carnegie Hall in New York at the age of nearly 88.
The campaign launched in Brazil and unfolded in two distinct stages. The first was a two-page correction notice — framed as a formal editorial errata — published in Folha de S.Paulo, one of Brazil's most widely read newspapers. The notice recounted Costa's 70-year career and asserted her foundational role in the creation of bossa nova, a contribution that had been systematically obscured by what reporting from creativebrief.com and adobomagazine.com describes as the compounding effects of racism, sexism, and cultural elitism. The second stage was a live event: a Carnegie Hall tribute concert titled "Bossa Nova: The Greatest Night," held on October 8th, at which Costa performed alongside Seu Jorge, Daniel Jobim, Roberto Menescal, and Carlinhos Brown.
The occasion itself carried deep historical resonance. Carnegie Hall had hosted a landmark 1962 concert that introduced bossa nova to the world stage, featuring Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, and Sérgio Mendes, among others. Alaíde Costa was absent from that event. The Errata at 88 campaign returned her to that same stage more than six decades later. Costa herself captured the significance of the moment directly: "I'm overjoyed to be able to take part in this celebration of bossa nova, this concert in New York, at Carnegie Hall, at Johnnie Walker's invitation. It's wonderful to finally be able to sing on the stage that showed our music to the world in the 1960s. Now it's time to show Alaíde Costa!" The campaign gave renewed, concrete meaning to Johnnie Walker's long-running brand platform, "Keep Walking," by anchoring it to a real, verifiable act of cultural recognition. Announced in June 2024 and recognised at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Errata at 88 earned the Grand Prix in Entertainment for Music, as confirmed by D&AD and adobomagazine.com. Clapboard rates the campaign 82 out of 100.
ARCHIVEJohnnie Walker is the leading global Scotch whisky brand by volume, according to The Spirits Business. In Brazil, a market where Scotch whisky carries significant cultural prestige and where premium spirits consumption has grown steadily, the brand's challenge is not visibility but resonance — specifically, connecting a Scottish heritage product to a deeply local emotional register.
The strategic insight driving Errata at 88 was precise: bossa nova is not merely a music genre in Brazil; it is a national identity marker, associated with intellectual sophistication, global influence, and postcolonial pride. By identifying the gap between that cultural pride and the specific injustice done to Alaíde Costa, AlmapBBDO located a tension point where a brand act — not just an advertisement — could carry genuine cultural weight. As reported by contagious.com and creativebrief.com, Costa's marginalisation from the official bossa nova narrative was a documented historical grievance, not a manufactured brand story, which gave the campaign a credibility that few purely creative conceits can achieve.
Diageo, Johnnie Walker's parent company and the largest Scotch producer by portfolio scale according to diageo.com, competes in the premium whisky segment against rivals including Chivas Regal, owned by Pernod Ricard, and The Macallan, owned by Edrington. In Brazil, where premium imported spirits occupy a symbolically aspirational position in consumer culture, brand differentiation increasingly turns on cultural authenticity rather than product specification alone. Errata at 88 addressed that dynamic by making Johnnie Walker the sponsor of a genuinely historic cultural event rather than a product placed adjacent to one. The "Keep Walking" platform, which the campaign reactivated with unusual specificity, positions the brand as an enabler of forward progress, and Costa's 70-year journey provided that idea with uncommon narrative gravity.
AlmapBBDO, São Paulo, conceived and executed Errata at 88 as a campaign structured around two distinct but interdependent creative gestures. The first was typographic and journalistic; the second was experiential and musical. Together, they form a campaign architecture that moves from the page to the stage, from private acknowledgment to public celebration.
The centrepiece of the first stage was the errata published in Folha de S.Paulo. In Brazilian newspaper culture, an errata is a formal correction notice — a legally and editorially recognised mechanism for retracting or amending published content. By framing 70 years of cultural omission in that journalistic form, AlmapBBDO did something rhetorically sophisticated: it used the grammar of institutional accountability to indict an institution, transforming a conventional advertising placement into a document of record. The choice of Folha de S.Paulo, one of Brazil's most authoritative national newspapers, was not incidental; it gave the correction the same register of seriousness as the original erasure deserved.
The second stage — the Carnegie Hall performance on October 8th — was designed to give the errata a living, witnessed conclusion. "Bossa Nova: The Greatest Night" reunited threads of bossa nova history that had been severed by Costa's original absence. The concert featured Seu Jorge, Daniel Jobim, Roberto Menescal, and Carlinhos Brown alongside Costa, creating a multigenerational tableau that made the campaign's point through presence rather than argument. Eric Strauss, Director of Scotch at Diageo Brazil, articulated the selection of Costa directly: "With a seventy-year career of constant dedication to music, Alaíde is one of the best examples that we could possibly think of". Production credits beyond AlmapBBDO's creative direction are not fully and publicly documented across available sources, but the dual-format execution — print and live event — reflects a campaign designed to generate both earned media and emotional memory across the Brazilian market and beyond.
No verified performance data for Errata at 88 covering sales lift, brand-awareness shifts, earned-media value, or market-share change is publicly available. What is documented is the campaign's award record and the structural conditions that made it effective.
Errata at 88 won the Grand Prix in Entertainment for Music at the 2024 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, as confirmed by dandad.org and adobomagazine.com. The award was announced in June 2024. According to adobomagazine.com, Diageo received three total Cannes Lions awards in 2024, with Errata at 88 accounting for the Grand Prix and the remaining two awarded for a Baileys campaign. Jennifer English, Global Brand Director at Johnnie Walker, acknowledged the significance of the recognition in statements reported following the June 2024 announcement.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several properties associated with durable brand impact. It is rooted in a verifiable, pre-existing cultural injustice rather than a constructed narrative, which dramatically reduces the risk of authenticity challenges that frequently undermine purpose-led advertising. It produced a primary asset — the Carnegie Hall concert — that is newsworthy independent of its brand association, meaning the event would be reported and discussed regardless of Johnnie Walker's involvement. In the Brazilian market, where bossa nova carries the emotional weight of a national origin story and where figures such as Tom Jobim, João Gilberto, and Sérgio Mendes are treated as cultural monuments, the act of restoring Alaíde Costa to that lineage carries a resonance that extends beyond the campaign's paid media footprint. The Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100 reflects the campaign's exceptional strategic coherence, its cultural specificity to Brazil, and the creative discipline required to make a newspaper correction notice the emotional centrepiece of a global award-winning campaign.
Errata at 88 is a 2024 Johnnie Walker campaign by AlmapBBDO that corrected bossa nova pioneer Alaíde Costa's historical erasure. It published a 70-year errata in Folha de S.Paulo and sponsored Costa's Carnegie Hall debut at nearly 88 years old, winning the Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Entertainment for Music in June 2024.
Errata at 88 won the 2024 Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Entertainment for Music because it combined a verifiable cultural injustice with two precisely executed creative gestures — a formal newspaper correction and a live Carnegie Hall concert — giving the Johnnie Walker "Keep Walking" platform rare documentary credibility and genuine emotional consequence in Brazil and globally.
Alaíde Costa is a Brazilian singer regarded as one of the founding mothers of bossa nova, with a career spanning more than 70 years. Despite her foundational role alongside figures such as Tom Jobim and João Gilberto, her contributions were historically marginalised. The Errata at 88 campaign, as reported by creativebrief.com, attributed that erasure to racism, sexism, and elitism.
The Folha de S.Paulo errata was a two-page formal correction notice published by Johnnie Walker and AlmapBBDO in one of Brazil's leading national newspapers. Structured as an official editorial errata, it recounted Alaíde Costa's 70-year career and asserted her overlooked role in the creation of bossa nova, using the grammar of institutional accountability as a creative device.
On October 8th, Alaíde Costa performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in a tribute concert titled "Bossa Nova: The Greatest Night," sponsored by Johnnie Walker. She appeared alongside Seu Jorge, Daniel Jobim, Roberto Menescal, and Carlinhos Brown. The event revisited the historic 1962 Carnegie Hall concert that had introduced bossa nova to the world, from which Costa had been absent.
Errata at 88 was created by AlmapBBDO in São Paulo, Brazil, for Johnnie Walker and its parent company Diageo Brasil. The campaign was produced and executed across Brazil and New York in 2024. Eric Strauss, Director of Scotch at Diageo Brazil, and Jennifer English, Global Brand Director at Johnnie Walker, were among the key brand figures associated with the initiative.
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