The spirits shelf, and the one sponsor with 441 videos

We measured your 111 closest rivals

Suntory Global Spirits, we analyzed our database of 700,000+ sponsored YouTube videos to map the spirits landscape and find which niches are OVER-SPONSORED and UNDER-SPONSORED.

We measured your 111 closest rivals, across 13 owners:

Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Brown-Forman, Bacardi, Campari, Sazerac and Heaven Hill, plus every celebrity-owned tequila and whiskey we could name.

Between them those 111 brands hold 372 creators and 660 paid videos, from 18 March 2021 through to 6 July 2026, so five years and four months of everything the category bought in a place where a description could show it.

Before we chart a brand's creator programme we ask two things of it, at least 100 creators on record and an average creator booked at least 2.2 times. Every other shelf we have counted had brands that cleared both halves of that. This one has none, not a single brand out of 111, which is why there is no measured pyramid anywhere in this post.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals across 111 spirits and ready to drink brands, pulled 13 August 2026.

660 videos, and 441 of them belong to a gift box

660 sponsored videos since 2021, and 441 of those belong to one men's subscription box that doesn't even sell alcohol. So 219 for everybody else.

The box is Bespoke Post, and it holds 288 of the 372 creators, so 66.8% of the whole shelf belongs to one company that does not distil anything. It is also finished. Its last recorded sponsored video went up on 7 October 2024, 190 of its 288 creators were paid once and never again, and it books the average creator 1.5 times, which is why even the largest programme on the shelf cannot be charted.

What it bought was men, and never spirits. Its biggest category is entertainment at 108 videos, then automotive at 33 and gaming at 29, which is a gift buy pointed at an audience rather than a category buy pointed at a drink. Take it out and 110 brands share 219 videos between them, over five years and four months.

Who says so: our own count, pulled 13 August 2026. The 219 is the 660 shelf total minus Bespoke Post's 441.

Nobody is buying creators

71 of the 111 brands have never paid a single creator we can find. The biggest one on the whole map is Casamigos, at 11 videos.

Biggest of the bottles, that is. Above Casamigos there is the gift box at 441, a light beer at 30 videos, a hard seltzer at 22, a non alcoholic brewer at 20 and a vodka iced tea at 15, and not one of those five is a distiller.

For scale, thirteen brands on the functional supplement shelf had 10,769 sponsored videos. Your category, at eight times the brand count, has 219.

Same database, same years, same way of counting, and thirteen supplement brands bought roughly fifty times what 111 spirits brands bought. The shelves where the same creators have been booked forty times over show what a category looks like once everybody has arrived.

Who says so: our own count, pulled 13 August 2026. The supplement figure has been corrected here. The original post carried a higher number for that shelf, taken off an earlier and looser pull of the same 13 brands, and the current pull, which is also the figure our supplement post carries, is 10,769.

We opened all 27 matched rows by hand

The database holds 750,888 recorded YouTube sponsorship rows. Searching it for the 41 Suntory spirits brands returned 27 matches, which sounds like a small programme until you open them.

On 12 August 2026 we checked every one of those 27 against the live YouTube API, and here is what survived.

Forty one Suntory spirits brands returned 27 matched rows. We opened each one and 10 were spirits videos, across 7 channels and 4 brands.

The other 17 were something else. Nine belonged to Suntory Flowers and its garden club, on one gardening channel. Four were Suntory Wellness supplements on a Singapore channel. Two were the same corporate water panel stored twice. One was a whiskey podcast reporting a partnership as news, and one was an unpaid review with no disclosure on it.

Then look at the 10 that survived. Six are podcast episode ad reads, every one of them fronted by a celebrity, and several bought in the same block as a hair supplement and a VPN, which makes them a podcast network buy rather than a partnership with a creator. Exactly one row in the whole audit is a disclosed creator ad, a 21 plus Short from TheNotoriousKIA about the Maker's Mark pop up in Union Square.

One creator ad. That is the audited state of the largest spirits group's YouTube creator marketing.

Who says so: our own audit of 27 matched rows opened against the YouTube API on 12 August 2026, kept row by row with the reason each one was confirmed or rejected.

A low number here is a hole in what we can see

This part matters more than any total above it. Alcohol brands cannot buy ordinary YouTube sponsor reads at any scale, because of age gating and platform ad policy, so the money goes to bars, festivals, on premise activation, sampling, sports sponsorship and paid media, and none of that ever appears in a video description. Our count reads video descriptions. So a low number next to a spirits brand describes our window, and it does not describe that brand's spending.

We tried to close the gap and mostly could not. On 13 August 2026 we ran our usual Instagram tagged feed scrape across five alcohol brands and four of them returned zero posts, because alcohol profiles are age restricted, so a logged out run resolves the account and then sees an empty feed. The fifth returned posts from the wrong account entirely, a private person at @fireball rather than the whisky at @fireballwhisky. Meta's ad library looked more promising, with roughly 210 active US ads mentioning Jim Beam, until we read who placed them. Supermarkets, liquor stores, bars, an auctioneer, and a page selling recreational vehicles.

Hashtag pages are the one door that opens, because explore pages are not age gated, and searching a brand's own partner and ambassador tags returned disclosed work inside the first 12 posts. Be honest about what that proves, though. Searching a partner hashtag and then counting partner hashtags as evidence is circular, so those posts prove only that a creator publicly declared a partnership, which is the disclosure convention in this category. They do not prove that an independent check uncovered a hidden deal.

This is the exact place a spirits brand gets a number wrong, either by trusting a zero that only means nobody looked, or by trusting a count that is measuring its own search terms. Knowing which of the two you are holding is most of the job, and it is a good part of what we take off a brand's hands, along with keeping the age gate, the 21 plus disclosure and the platform rules straight so a campaign does not turn into a letter six months later. If you sell alcohol it is worth reading what an age gated brand is allowed to ask a creator to say before anybody signs anything.

Who says so: our own scrape logs from 13 August 2026, the scraper's own restricted profile message, and our own reads of the Meta ad library on the same day.

But everyone is buying celebrities

We mapped celebrity deals across 104 of the same brands and found 89, each with a source link, across 53 brands.

Diageo took actors. 24 deals across 12 brands, the most of anyone.

You took actors and athletes. 14 deals across 8 brands, third of the nineteen owners and behind only Diageo. Anna Sawai on Hibiki, Willem Dafoe on Laphroaig, Kelsey Plum and Lucien Laviscount on Maker's Mark, Eli Manning taking an equity stake in Knob Creek.

Pernod Ricard, 12 deals across 7 brands. Bacardi, 8 across 4. Campari, 6 across 5.

The category buys 41 actors, 14 musicians and 11 athletes, and almost nothing underneath them.

So the honest headline for the whole group is that Suntory buys celebrity advertising rather than creator marketing, and it is good at the celebrity half. Now put those same brands back next to their shelf count. Maker's Mark has 4 creators and 5 recorded videos. Tres Generaciones has 1 creator and 3 videos. Jim Beam has 1 and 1, Laphroaig has 1 and 1. Knob Creek, Yamazaki, Hibiki, Roku, Sipsmith and Skinnygirl have no recorded paid videos at all.

If you want to see what the top of one of these costs and what came back for the money, we keep a sheet of what celebrities were paid and what the brand got for it.

Who says so: our own celebrity sweep of 104 spirits brands, every deal carrying a source link, checked in August 2026. The brand count has been corrected here. The original post said the sweep covered the same 111 brands as the shelf count, and it covered 104, which is the separate brand list that sweep was built on.

The three programmes that are genuine creator marketing

For a reader trying to copy something rather than count something, these are the useful parts of the whole group.

Jim Beam's Creator Campus, announced 4 August 2026. Creators apply openly, then make original work at the Clermont distillery. It is the only piece of the group built to bring creators in as a standing programme rather than one campaign at a time.

Maker's Mark runs the most complete version, with local influencer pop ups, including the 2026 Aspen Food and Wine Classic with food creator Owen Han, plus a named ambassador programme underneath it. It is also the only brand in the group that turns up in every method we tried, the YouTube audit, the hashtag search and the celebrity sweep, which is what a working programme looks like from the outside.

Lucozade's POSITIVECHAIN is on the soft drinks side of the house, a paid influencer campaign built with the agency The Fifth alongside Suntory's in house team. It is proof the company already knows how to run one, on a brand where the age gate is not in the way.

Who says so: our own research on the Suntory group, checked in August 2026, from the companies' own announcements and the agency's own write up.

Over-sponsored

Nothing, and that is the finding. There is no crowded room in spirits creator marketing because almost nobody is in the building.

Entertainment is the busiest thing here and it is nowhere near crowded, at 156 of the 660 deals, 23.6% of the shelf, spread over 79 creators and 13 brands, which is 2.0 videos each. Sports has 53 deals across 28 creators with 15 brands buying, the widest spread anywhere on the shelf. Food has 51 deals across 22 creators and 12 brands. Automotive at 34 and gaming at 29 belong almost entirely to the gift box, so neither says anything about spirits.

Then there is the number that decides what a name costs you.

358 of the 372 creators on this shelf have been paid by exactly one brand. Only 14 have been paid by two.

Nobody has been paid by three. So when you approach a creator here you are almost certainly not bidding against another spirits brand, and the price you are quoted is a first price rather than a defended one.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals across 111 spirits and ready to drink brands, pulled 13 August 2026.

Under-sponsored

Everything below celebrity. The few creators who are being paid are easy to find once you look in the right place, because alcohol brand pages are age-restricted and hide from the usual tools. Morgan Wallen carries #JackDanielsPartner to 9.5 million followers. Julia Garner posted Casamigos to 1.7 million. Underneath them sit ordinary creators running proper #Ad21+ disclosures for Maker's Mark and Jim Beam, and nobody has gone looking for them.

That is a pyramid with a head and no body.

The bar and cocktail middle is emptier than that even sounds. Steve the Bartender has 812,000 subscribers and 3 paid spirits videos across 2 brands in five years. The two most shared names on the whole shelf are not bar channels at all, a general interest podcast at 241,000 subscribers with 9 deals, and a surf publication at 38,000 subscribers with another 9. A bartending channel of that size with three paid videos in the whole category tells you more than any total above it.

Who says so: our own count of recorded paid YouTube deals, pulled 13 August 2026, plus our own hashtag search of alcohol partner tags on 13 August 2026.

Where the cheap entry is

The cheapest entry is the entire middle of your category. Nobody in spirits has planted a really SOLID position there, which would mean you aren't directly competing with the other ones.

The tedious part of getting there is the age gate, from checking a creator's audience age, to writing a disclosure that holds up, to keeping a claim inside what a distiller is allowed to say. That is the part we run for brands, from the first shortlist through to finished videos with the paperwork behind them. If you want to know which of those 91 channels would answer a message this quarter, tell us what you are launching and we will bring the names with their history attached.