The letter that wouldn't sit still - 'Dear Monk' goes viral
Quick recap: when a regulatory shake-up pulled Old Monk off shelves this month, our client Alpha Bull Rum had the easy opening to make it about themselves. We wrote Old Monk a letter instead (respectful, unprompted), closing on "Even a Bull bows to a Monk."
Eighteen and a half thousand likes, and not one of them came from a discount code or a giveaway, just a letter.
Within days it had done the one thing adverts almost never manage: people passed it around entirely unprompted, on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and by the sound of it every third WhatsApp friend group, college group and alumni group in the country. (Somewhere in the forwarding we became "Red Dot Agency": for the record, it's Roll, not Red, though we suspect that correction gets forwarded about as often as the letter did.)
The one that means the most to us: our client Vedant Jaiswal posted his own note about it, crediting the Roll Dot team directly. In the comments, a career army officer, describing himself as "an old soldier and an Old Monk diehard," wrote that the letter brought him to tears.
A CNBC anchor picked it up too, sharing it to a following in the thousands.
On LinkedIn, the conversation went further: regulation, nostalgia, what it actually means to compete with some dignity, none of it prompted or briefed by us.
None of it was the plan. The plan was one honest letter. Everyone deciding to pass it on was the part nobody wrote.