Something to sip on: What's working in beverage advertising

With so many new trends and offerings, what’s really working in advertising for the beverage industry these days? 

In this year’s State of Creative Effectiveness report, we decided to dive deeper into what creative effectiveness, or the power of creative to drive short and long-term effects for the brand, looks like in each category. 

Read on for a look into what’s working in the beverage category based on what we discovered from our study of effectiveness data from over 4,000 US ads, which includes both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, as well as some examples of beverage advertising done right.

Let’s first cover where the data comes from. 

Developed in partnership with some of the world’s biggest consumer brands, Zappi’s Amplify Ad System blends the best thinking in advertising research to give a well-rounded and complete picture of creative effectiveness. 

• In-context exposure: Measures real media behavior, ad skipping, brand recall and purchase impact.

• Emojis: Captures emotional response in an intuitive and globally relevant and representative way.

• Forced exposure: Assesses key ad KPIs, social risk and direct consumer feedback.

With this approach, we get a full picture of creative effectiveness. We can also understand an individual piece of creative’s strengths and weaknesses to help diagnose issues and optimize it so it performs to its fullest potential.

Looking across the data from over 4,000 US ads collected with this methodology, we focused on the averages for each metric for each category — in this case, the beverage category. 

Keep in mind that these are the averages of the category, which means that many of the individual ads in those categories are stronger than the average and many are weaker than the average. 

This helps us understand the general strengths and weaknesses of the whole category, not just individual brands within the category. This data can provide useful benchmarks for your individual ads and give a picture of how hard your advertising may need to work to overcome any common challenges for advertising within that category. 

Now that we’ve covered our approach, let’s get into our findings. 

The alcohol category does a good job of creating distinctive ads that make people feel something, primarily laughter. In fact, it’s one of the strongest categories in laughter and overall emotion. 

But overall, its key strength is in purchase uplift (27% vs. 19% average). More than most categories included in this analysis, alcohol does a great job of making people more likely to consider their brands as a result of their advertising.

This is important for a category with so many brands and subcategories — so making sure your brand comes to mind positively and enters/remains in the consideration set is critical.

However, it does struggle slightly with brand recall, meaning that not all of its creativity is harnessed for the brands being advertised. 

💡 Zappi advice: Continue to create distinctive ads and keep leveraging humor when it makes sense. But don’t be afraid to lean more into love as a way to stand out! Most importantly, focus on making sure your brand shines through in every one of your ads, make sure it’s consistent across campaigns and that each ad gives your brand a role. If you have DBAs, use as many as you can in a consistent way over time. If you don’t have any DBAs, now is the time to start establishing them.

Non-alcoholic beverages (like carbonated soft drinks, teas, waters and juices) sit in the middle of the pack — achieving roughly average scores and not outperforming the average. 

It matches the average in distinctiveness, brand recall, like and laughter and underperforms slightly in relevance, purchase uplift and overall emotion. 

However, this category does have a lot of very strong ads. Some brands have been creating great ads for decades, while others have both excelled and struggled over time. And there are many new entrants to the category, some of which are struggling to find their stride while others are breaking all the category codes and successfully gaining attention from the big players.

Overall, this is a category with a lot of good ads and a lot of weak ads, resulting in average scores across the board.

💡 Zappi advice: Make sure your ads are the good ones from the category. Look at what others in the category are doing and consider what you can do to stand out in a way that’s true to your brand. Connect emotionally with audiences. And most importantly, give your brand a role in each of your ads.

Here’s a few examples of brands who did a great job at advertising for this category, whether it be for alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks: 

Budweiser’s “First Delivery”

While some alcohol brands can struggle with leaning into love versus the more typical  laughter reaction to stand out, Budweiser did an excellent job at exactly that for their 2025 Super Bowl ad “First Delivery.”

This ad does an excellent job of taking the viewer on an emotional journey, following a young Clydesdale on a mission to save the day by delivering a fallen keg. It’s a great example of how good storytelling and love goes a long way in advertising and can help hook your audience from start to finish. In fact, this ad captivates the audience from the beginning, with 90% of viewers watching the full ad — not an easy achievement for a 100 second spot!

This ad is also undeniably enjoyable and emotionally connects with people, driving multiple peaks of love and laughter throughout.

Liquid Death’s “Ozzy Osbourne warns kids not to snort Liquid Death”

We found that brands in the non-alcoholic beverage category should consider focusing more on connecting emotionally with audiences as well as aim to give their brand more of a role in the story. Liquid Death is a master at both of these methods, which particularly shines through in their “Ozzy Osbourne warns kids not to snort Liquid Death” ad. 

This spot features the late and legendary Prince of Darkness himself and promotes the brand’s new Death Dust, a powdered electrolyte mix. The spot shows Ozzy driving around and telling a pair of kids not to snort the stuff and the real purpose of the powder — a hilarious poke at both the rockstar and the mix. It’s an incredibly distinctive ad that sets the brand apart from the category and makes the product itself the center of the story. 

And they’re consistently great at this! Even when promoting their new keg sized option of Liquid Death to pregnant women in “Kegs for Pregs,” the brand maintains their edge and humor, generating a lot of laughs and enjoyment from viewers, while still keeping their product and brand at the heart of the story.

There’s many things that brands in the beverage industry can learn from consumers about what’s working in their advertising and what’s not. 

For more on how to create ads that win with consumers, download our report for a deeper dive into our findings, including: 

• How creative effectiveness varies among different ages and genders 

• The impact of various advertising characteristics on effectiveness, like the use of celebrities, music, AI, etc.

• Strengths and weaknesses of different categories including CPG food, QSR, alcoholic beverages, financial services, telecommunications and more

• Helpful tips and examples to help you develop your most effective creative — including guidance from our partners at VaynerMedia, an integrated strategy, creative and media agency