The Real Story Behind “Keep Walking,” Johnnie Walker’s Most Famous Slogan

Johnnie Walker is instantly recognizable by the square bottle on a back bar, the slanted label, or the little man in the top hat striding across it. The “Keep Walking” slogan is almost as familiar, and it has been part of the brand’s advertising for more than 25 years.

When Johnnie Walker introduced “Keep Walking” around the turn of the millennium, it also made a change to the Striding Man himself. For most of the 20th century, he had walked from right to left across the label, so the brand turned him around to walk left to right, in keeping with the new message about moving forward. According to The Drinks Business, that meant changing the image on around 14,000 products in 184 countries.

“Keep Walking” wasn’t Johnnie Walker’s first big slogan, though. For decades before it, the brand ran with “Born 1820 – Still Going Strong,” and plenty of other memorable lines came and went along the way.

So, let’s take a look at where Johnnie Walker’s most famous slogans came from, and how the brand got from one to the other.

A Whisky Company That Didn’t Believe in Advertising

For a brand now known around the world for its adverts, Johnnie Walker got off to a quiet start. According to Nicholas Morgan in Johnnie Walker: A Long Stride, Alexander Walker, the son of founder John Walker, was wary of advertising and worked on the principle that “Quality will stand on its merit.” For much of the 19th century, the bottle did most of the selling instead.

The square bottle fit more neatly into shipping crates and was easy to spot on a shelf. The slanted label, designed by Smith Brothers of Kilmarnock, was registered at Stationers’ Hall in 1874 and trademarked in 1877. 

The whisky also won awards at exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne in 1880, Paris in 1885, and Adelaide in 1887, and the company added medal labels to its bottles as a sign of quality.

By the early 1900s, customers were asking for the whisky by the nickname “Johnnie Walker” rather than its formal name, John Walker & Sons’ Old Highland Whisky. 

In 1905 and 1906, director James Stevenson ran the company’s first press adverts using the nickname, explaining that “to-day the name stands not only for Scotch Whisky, but is associated with QUALITY consistent and uniform.”

A Lunch Menu Sketch and “Born 1820 – Still Going Strong”

The Striding Man came along in the years before World War I, when Stevenson brought in some outside help. 

According to Morgan, he worked with American advertising man Paul E. Derrick, copywriter Horace Barnes, and the cartoonist Tom Browne, who sketched the figure on a lunch menu at the Savoy Hotel in London. 

The team wanted something different from the whisky adverts of the day, which Morgan describes as relying on images of “bibulous gentry and kilted Highland chieftains.”

Browne drew a Regency gentleman in a top hat, red coat, and white breeches, complete with a monocle and a cane. Alongside him came the slogan “Born 1820 – Still Going Strong,” with 1820 referring to the year the business was founded. 

The line stuck around for a long time, and it still appears in a Johnnie Walker advert from as late as 1960.

If you’d like the full story of the Striding Man himself, I’ve covered it in The Man Who Never Stops: How the Striding Man Defined Johnnie Walker.

One Idea, Lots of Slogans

“Born 1820 – Still Going Strong” was the slogan that stuck, but Johnnie Walker ran plenty of other lines over the next few decades, and you can find many of them in our Johnnie Walker Advert Archive.

In 1909, around the time of the Royal Commission on Whisky, one advert showed the Striding Man leading the way out of a thick fog with the line “Out of the fog of uncertainty in whisky Johnnie Walker leads the way.” 

The same year, Tom Browne drew a cricket-themed poster called “1820 Not Out,” and between 1910 and 1912, Sir Bernard Partridge illustrated a print series built around the rhyme “Fashions come, fashions go; with ‘Johnnie Walker’ ’tis not so.”

For the company’s centenary in 1920, artist Leo Cheney drew a series of more than 30 cartoons showing the Striding Man traveling the world, with the promise of “Guaranteed same quality all over the world.” 

During World War II, the “Good Work, Good Whisky” campaign, illustrated by Clive Uptton and Rowland Hilder, featured people working on the home front, such as shipbuilders and farmers.

After the war came “Time Marches On” and, in the 1950s, “the smooth round whisky in the square bottle.” In the 1960s, under US distributor Paul Burnside, Red Label was advertised as “so smooth it’s the world’s best selling Scotch.” 

Why “Still Going Strong” Stopped Working

By the late 1990s, Johnnie Walker’s advertising had become scattered. The Drinks Business reported that seven different campaigns were running across different markets, and Red Label and Black Label were being treated almost as separate brands. 

Sales were slipping, too. Creative Salon reports that they fell by 14% in the three years before the new campaign launched.

Diageo decided to bring everything together under one global idea. Alice Avis, the company’s global brand director for Johnnie Walker, worked with the advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) on a new direction. 

Rather than leaning on the brand’s long history, the campaign focused on personal progress. As Morgan explains in A Long Stride, the thinking was that “A man was judged a success not by where he was, but where he was going.”

Turning the Striding Man Around

With the new idea in place, the Striding Man needed to look like he was heading forward, which is why he was flipped to walk from left to right. The Drinks Business reported that Diageo put £100 million behind the global relaunch, and the first TV adverts arrived in 2000 as part of a series called “Icons,” featuring people such as actor Harvey Keitel and Italian footballer Roberto Baggio.

According to Morgan, “Keep Walking” launched in more than 120 markets and went on to double the brand’s global sales. 

The campaign kept producing memorable work over the following years. One of the best-known is The Man Who Walked Around the World from 2009, a short film in which actor Robert Carlyle walks along a Scottish road while telling the history of Johnnie Walker. Film Detail reported that it was filmed in one continuous take. 

In 2015, the design agency Bloom and illustrator Gary Redford gave the Striding Man a fresh redraw, as Design Week reported.

“Keep Walking” Today

More than 25 years later, “Keep Walking” is still Johnnie Walker’s global slogan. In November 2025, Diageo announced the next chapter of the campaign, which is rolling out around the world in 2026. 

This time, the focus is on the word “keep,” and Diageo says the new work came out of studying “over 97 million ‘keep’ conversations” online. You can read more about it in our coverage of the 2026 campaign.

The brand has also been working with Sabrina Carpenter, and in September 2026 the two released a limited-edition Black Label bottle.

Still Walking

Johnnie Walker’s slogans have changed plenty of times since the first press adverts in the early 1900s, from “Still Going Strong” to “Keep Walking.” The Striding Man has been part of the advertising for almost all of that time, and these days he’s walking left to right.

If you’d like to dig further into the history, Morgan’s Johnnie Walker: A Long Stride is well worth picking up, and our Advert Archive has more than 100 of the brand’s older adverts to browse.