A video marketing strategy for beverage brands w/ examples
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Properly placed video media assets can serve the full funnel, even for alcoholic beverage brands facing decline.
Although YouTube has risen to become the world's largest media company in 2026, estimated $40.4 billion from advertising alone in 2025, many brands still have yet to use YouTube and other video marketing channels to their full growth-driving potential.
In April 2026, Exverus by Brainlabs Senior Programmatic Advertising Trader Lexi Semanskee, M.S., headed to New Orleans to present her team's successful 2025 video marketing strategy that grew an anonymous beer brand despite category decline.
Lexi covered:
Alcoholic beverage industry challenges
Declining demand
The U.S. beer category is in a genuine structural headwind. Over the past four years, the alcohol industry has seen an estimated $830 billion drop in revenue, and the trajectory continues. Beer volumes fell -3% in 2024, consistent with the -3% CAGR decline recorded over the full 2019–2024 period, per IWSR.
The reasons are well-documented: Gen Z entering the 21+ market with reduced consumption rates, and the simultaneous rise of cannabis and non-alcoholic alternatives. Only 58% of U.S. adults reported consuming alcohol at all in 2024 — a figure not seen since 1996. Beyond the macro decline, Lexi identified the internal obstacles her team navigates on every alcohol campaign:
Creative barriers
Even when creatives are fully compliant with TTB federal advertising regulations — which govern alcohol advertising across all digital platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok under Industry Circular 2024-1 — campaigns can be rejected or paused without warning. A client may want to be on a specific platform lineup, and it may simply not be available to alcohol advertisers.
Scalability
The audience funnel for an alcohol brand shrinks fast. You're already restricted to 21+ content, then you layer in age, demographic, geographic, and third-party audience targeting. By the time you've done it right, the addressable pool is a fraction of what a standard CPG marketer works with. Maintaining CPM efficiency at scale requires deliberate architecture from the start.
Campaign parameters
Before diving into tactics, a quick look at what the team was working with:
Budget: Under $10 million
Channel preference: A preferred mix of CTV partners
Primary KPIs: VCR, CPCV, CPM, CTR, VTC, Reach, Frequency, and a cross-channel brand lift study (BLS)
Available creative: Video, social display, creator content, and custom content
Stretch goal: Be first in uncharted territory — test new formats in alcohol before anyone else does
With those parameters set, the team evaluated the most-talked-about trend in full-funnel video: rich media and enhanced CTV. The pitch is compelling — enhanced CTV is one of the first formats to enable genuine engagement measurement beyond view-through on connected TV. But for this client, the team said no.
The reasoning is worth noting: the brand had exceptional creative built to own the full screen. Choosing an interactive or enhanced format would have compromised that creative impact — and the campaign was anchored in an awareness mandate. Good strategy sometimes means declining what's new in favor of what's right for the specific brief.
Media innovation within brand constraints
Here's where the actual work gets interesting. Rather than defaulting to off-the-shelf audiences and standard placements, Lexi's team built a layered, custom-architected approach across three innovation areas.
Strategic audience sourcing
The team deliberately avoided pre-built Trade Desk audience segments, despite the range available. Every audience was custom-built, with a lean toward first-party-quality shopper data:
Third-party purchase data drawn from trusted shopper and receipt sources — purchase-verified audiences rather than broad interest proxies.
Resonate, an AI-powered audience platform, generated audiences from real-time behavioral signals and activated them across CTV, Meta, and TikTok. Lexi described it as "a first-party, third-party audience source" — third-party data powered by first-party-grade AI modeling.
Retargeting built not from general site visitors but from video-exposed, social-exposed, and search-exposed users — then activated on standard CTV to raise frequency in Q2 and Q3 as the campaign pivoted toward consideration.
Retail media via Walmart Connect & Kroger
Using both Walmart Connect and Kroger through the Trade Desk, the team unlocked something most programmatic beer campaigns don't get: direct ROAS measurement on upper-funnel tactics.
The approach paired standard CTV inventory with accompanying display, targeting net-new audiences on the retail platforms. Walmart's ROAS benchmark range was $0.91–$10.33; Kroger's was $0.60–$17.00. Performance came in within those benchmarks.
Audience-driven genre & content targeting → YouTube
The most analytically interesting move started as a contextual CTV play and became something else entirely.
The approach: take the target audience profile, run it through emerging AI tools to identify what content and genre trends they were engaging with, then use those findings to inform targeting. The contextual layer on CTV didn't work — niche CTV setups with multiple priority audience segments already stacked in don't have headroom for additional contextual filters without collapsing delivery.
So, the team pivoted: they pushed the content trend insights into YouTube activations and cinema instead.
Insights & tracking by channel
YouTube as a full-funnel video marketing strategy
"I feel like there are a lot of brands that are still sleeping on the opportunity to utilize YouTube as more than just video," Lexi said. "It's social, it's CTV, it's audio, and it's even commerce."
YouTube's practical advantages the team identified for alcohol brands specifically:
Greater CPM efficiency and reach versus standard CTV buys
Multi-touchpoint exposure across Shorts, YouTube Select, and YouTube TV — all on the largest screen in the house
Lower barriers to entry for brand lift and search lift studies — every brand lift study the team ran on YouTube showed positive lift
Over 70% of all impressions served across the full campaign — awareness and consideration combined — were on CTV devices. On YouTube Select alone, that figure rose to 95%. The brand was reaching people on the biggest screen in the house, through a platform with digital targeting precision, at costs that outperformed standard TV.
The brand lift study confirmed the approach: YouTube Video and CTV both drove higher favorability lift year-over-year. Overall CTV awareness lift increased with the addition of retargeting audiences in Q3.
Cinema: The surprise showstopper
Cinema was largely managed as a direct partnership rather than through programmatic, but the results earned their own section.
Using the content trend insights from the AI analysis, the team identified select genres and releases whose audiences overlapped with the target consumer profile. A 30-second spot ran across those titles at seven test sites nationwide. An intercept study surveyed approximately 250 moviegoers:
Cinema is a leaned-in environment with near-zero distraction. When the targeting is right — content that aligns with the brand's creative message, audiences who match the target profile — the impact is disproportionate to the spend.
Learnings & recommendations for the brand
Lexi's closing recommendations were honest about what worked, what was left on the table, and where the strategy grows from here.
On CTV: Lean harder into Resonate and retargeting audiences in 2026 to maximize first-party data signals and frequency. Continue prioritizing retail tactics paired with display — the combination of awareness reach and measurable ROAS is too valuable to treat as a one-year test.
On YouTube: Prioritize Select placements to maximize premium YouTube TV content and engagement metrics. Continue testing new formats — sequential messaging campaigns are a priority for the next cycle, and pause ads remain unexplored territory in the alcohol category.
On Cinema: Continue aligning with tentpole cultural moments where brand messaging fits organically. The lean-in environment remains one of the highest-impact channels per dollar when the content context is right.
On the horizon: Atmosphere (for digital out-of-home) and GSTV (at gas station screens) are being added to the 2026 mix — extending the brand's video footprint into high-frequency, purchase-adjacent environments.
The broader opportunity, in Lexi's framing: the future of video and TV is more social and engaging than ever. Go beyond awareness to give audiences the full picture.
You can watch Lexi's full presentation here:
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