Diageo created a non-alcoholic lemonade with no purpose other than to advertise Johnnie Walker whisky in a country where advertising whisky is illegal. The company says so. The trade press celebrates it. And India’s regulators have done nothing to stop it.
India does not allow direct advertising of alcoholic products across broadcast media, and similar limitations apply in print and outdoor advertising. So Diageo created Johnnie Walker Blonde Non-Alcoholic Lemonade – a product sold in 250ml cans that carries the Johnnie Walker name, logo, and colour palette into advertising spaces where the company’s actual products cannot legally appear.
The beer industry has used this playbook for years – Heineken 0.0, Budweiser 0.0, and countless other zero-alcohol beers serve as brand-sharing vehicles that keep alcohol branding visible in spaces where alcohol marketing is not allowed or not tolerated. But the spirits industry has no equivalent of zero-alcohol beer. Diageo’s solution was to invent an entirely different product – a lemonade – for the sole purpose of carrying a whisky brand past India’s advertising limitations.
The trade press does not hide this. The Whiskey Wash described the strategy as “surprisingly strategic” and explained that the lemonade “becomes the legally promotable face of the Blonde brand in India.” Festival lounges, fashion collaborations, and social campaigns “can all carry the lemonade name without directly advertising whisky.” A spirits industry publication openly explaining how a product circumvents advertising law tells you everything about what that product is actually for.
The Loophole in Action
At Lollapalooza India 2026 in Mumbai, Diageo put this loophole to work at scale. The company was the official partner of the festival’s Platinum Lounge. Its “Blonde Social Club” activation offered personalised merchandise, interactive games, and signature serves. And it extended the campaign beyond the venue through partnerships with Uber, Zepto, MyGate, and Indē Wild – touching, in Diageo’s own words, “every moment of the consumer journey.”
India’s alcohol industry has long relied on surrogate advertising – developing non-alcoholic products that carry the same name and visual identity as alcoholic ones, then advertising those instead. Royal Stag promoted music CDs. Kingfisher marketed mineral water. Diageo promotes lemonade. The products differ; the purpose is identical: keeping the alcohol brand visible where alcohol advertising is banned. India’s 2022 Guidelines for Prevention of Misleading Advertisements explicitly restrict misleading surrogate advertising, and the government signalled plans for tougher rulesin 2024. Draft regulations have yet to be finalised.
Diageo does not disguise the commercial logic. Johnnie Walker Blonde has been sold as a ready-to-drink whisky-and-lemonade mix in several markets for years. In its 2022 Annual Report, Diageo stated it launched Blonde “in six markets globally to recruit new scotch consumers.” In a 2025 investor presentation, the company highlighted that Blonde attracts “a more diverse audience” from outside traditional whisky occasions. Peer-reviewed research on Diageo’s India strategy has documented how the company explicitly targets India’s younger generation and emerging middle class – and how this directly conflicts with evidence-based public health recommendations.
The Evidence Is Clear
Research consistently confirms that surrogate advertising works as intended. A University of Stirling study found that young people aged 11 to 17 could not distinguish between no/low alcohol product promotion and traditional alcohol marketing when these shared branding. An Australian study published in 2025 found that adolescents categorised zero-alcohol products as alcohol – and that modified brand logos on non-alcoholic products triggered the same desire to use alcohol as the originals. In India, an ICMR study found that surrogate brands dominated over 41% of advertisements during the 2023 Cricket World Cup, with a separate survey showing 56% of consumers were unaware they were seeing surrogate advertising – while over 70% were influenced by it.
Diageo was not the only alcohol company at Lollapalooza India 2026. AB InBev’s Budweiser 0.0 powered the BudX Stage with fan zones, a Ferris wheel, and backstage access. Alcohol corporations use no/low alcohol product lines to access youth-oriented cultural events that would be off-limits to their core products. This is the same strategy documented in Heineken’s “Bakerl0.0” campaign on the London Underground, and in AB InBev’s use of the Corona brand at mass public events.
But the Johnnie Walker lemonade case marks an escalation. Surrogate advertising in India is not new – but it has until now relied on products that at least gesture toward a consumer function: mineral water, music CDs, soda. Diageo has dispensed with even that pretence. The lemonade is a product category invented to carry a brand name. India’s advertising law does not allow whisky ads. Diageo created a lemonade to get around it.
Sources
Bartram A, et al. Alcohol advertising in disguise: Do zero-alcohol drinks make adolescents think of alcohol? International Journal of Drug Policy. 2025;139:104753.
Critchlow N, Holmes J, Fitzgerald N. Alibi marketing? Surrogate marketing? Brand sharing? Addiction. 2024. DOI: 10.1111/add.16504.
Diageo. Annual Report 2022. London: Diageo plc, 2022.
Diageo. CAGNY 2025 Presentation. London: Diageo plc, 2025.
Esser MB, Jernigan DH. Multinational Alcohol Market Development and Public Health: Diageo in India. American Journal of Public Health. 2015;105(11):2220–2227.
Purves R, et al. Still Advertising Alcohol: How NoLo and Alibi Sponsorship Keep Alcohol Brands in Front of Young People. University of Stirling, 2025.