When The On-Trade Toy Breaks: Listing Fees, Distillery Trips and the Pay-To-Play Trap with Chris Maffeo at BCB
Everyone agrees that brands and bars should be partners. Then you look at how the money moves, and the word means nothing.
I gave this talk at Bar Convent Berlin to a room of mostly brand-side professionals. The framing I opened with is the one that keeps surfacing every time I sit between a brand and a bar: the drinks industry and the hospitality industry sit on the same coin but do not speak the same language.
The Patterns Burning Budget
You fund a guest shift in a key city. The bartender posts about it. Your brand name does not appear in the caption. Your managing director sees the post. You cannot explain why the logo is missing from a trip you paid for.
You pay a listing fee to get on a cocktail menu. The menu says "gin." Not your gin. You bring the finance director to see the activation. She reads the menu. She sees a category, not a brand. You tell her to trust the process.
You send a bartender on a distillery trip. They post about the scenery, the food, the flight. Your bottle appears in one Instagram story. The bartender's personal brand grows. Your rate of sale at home does not move.
You sponsor a competition. The winner celebrates. Your logo sits on the backdrop. Three months later, nobody remembers which brand funded it.
You are a bartender working with five brands this quarter. Your Instagram shows a different "best gin" every other week. Your credibility erodes with every post. The brands that trusted you notice.
These are not separate problems. They are the same pattern: investment flowing in one direction with no mechanism to prove it ever comes back.
Why This Pattern Persists
The drinks industry has not changed its fundamental mechanics in decades. Cases still move from distillery to warehouse to bar to consumer. What has changed is the number of brands competing for the same shelf space, the same menu slot, the same bartender's attention.
Big brands used to walk into a bar and see their portfolio reflected in the back bar. That era is over. A single venue now stocks bottles from dozens of producers, multiple distributors, and a growing number of independent players nobody saw coming five years ago.
The pressure concentrates on the person behind the bar.
Brand one says sell mine. Brand two says sell mine. Brand three offers a trip. Brand four offers a competition.
The bartender who says yes to all of them becomes the face of none.
And the mechanism that would force anyone to stop and map this, to ask whether the investment is producing pull or just funding presence, does not exist. Everyone agrees it should. Nobody builds it.
If the above resonates, it’s because you’re living it.
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