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By Andy El-Bayeh, CEO of Example
The drinks category is running a very expensive race to nowhere.
Every brand now has a festival tent, a DJ partnership, and a curated “cultural platform.” The photography is good. The influencer numbers are fine. The post-mortem decks are full of impressions, reach, and UGC counts.
And absolutely none of it is building anything that lasts.
The problem isn’t that brands have stopped caring about culture. It’s that they’ve started confusing access to culture with participation in it.
Buying a headline slot at a festival doesn’t make you a cultural brand any more than attending a gallery opening makes you an artist. It just means you can afford the ticket.
What actually works is different. It’s rooted in something genuine about what the brand believes, expressed through a creative idea with enough integrity that people want to share it on its own terms, not because a budget is behind it, but because it earns its place.
The Macallan doesn’t need to be everywhere. It needs to mean something in the rooms that matter. This is a brand that has spent thirty years being precise about the audiences it cultivates, the cultural moments it aligns with, and the stories it tells. The result is genuine premium positioning in every market it operates, not because it outspends the category, but because it outthinks it.
Earned first. Paid as amplifier. Not the reverse.
The harder conversation for most brand teams is internal. Every reporting structure in the drinks industry is built around reach metrics and cost-per-engagement. The numbers on an influencer brief are clean and easy to defend. The numbers on long-term brand equity are harder to put in a deck.
The result: hollower and hollower spectacle, at higher and higher cost.
Earned-first means asking: if we pulled the paid media behind this activation tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? Would anything continue to travel on its own?
If the answer is no, the idea isn’t strong enough yet.
The consumer has seen it. They’ve been to the festival tent. They’ve double-tapped the perfectly lit influencer content. And they’re bored.
The brands that will win the next decade in drinks and hospitality aren’t the ones spending the most. They’re the ones willing to say no to the noise and put the budget into something that actually means something.
