It could be the biggest beer bash you’ll probably never be invited to attend.
A tradition in the business: Every year, usually in the spring ahead of the summer selling season, the major brewers invite all their distributor partners* (or the two or three from each operation lucky enough to be tapped to make the trip) to a national convention that’s part showbiz, part salesmanship, part… party. How big a party? This week in San Diego, parts of city streets will be closed to the public to allow 3,750 MillerCoors beer guys to get off the sidewalks and party like... they're in New Orleans!
A tradition in the business: Every year, usually in the spring ahead of the summer selling season, the major brewers invite all their distributor partners* (or the two or three from each operation lucky enough to be tapped to make the trip) to a national convention that’s part showbiz, part salesmanship, part… party. How big a party? This week in San Diego, parts of city streets will be closed to the public to allow 3,750 MillerCoors beer guys to get off the sidewalks and party like... they're in New Orleans!
Normally two days in length, these events feature large-scale gatherings where the audience is treated to brewery- management business reviews (usually kept to the barest minimum lest eyes begin to glaze over), multi-media entertainment accompanied by hard-driving music (in case some eyes have glazed over), and celebrity appearances. Actors, sports figures, even military heroes. Keeping the audience's excitement level high is a key objective.
| No theatrical trick is spared to bring the audience to a murmuring fervor. Take, for example, NASCAR driver, Brad Keselowski's, entrance at last year's MillerCoors show. | |
The real climax of the meeting comes when brand plans and initiatives for the coming season are revealed. This is when the marketing folks take center-stage. Carefully developed presenter scripts and hours of rehearsal culminate at showtime. Now the real drama behind all the hoopla begins to unfold.
| Each individual brand normally gets some amount of time, but the big brands get the big attention. New packages are showcased. New sports partnerships and media deals are detailed. New promotion plans get laid out. And probably most important of all, new advertising is shown. That's when the drama reaches its career-rocking cresendo. |  |
Months of advertising planning-- from strategy development through concept exploration to commercial production--amounting to thousands of hours of meetings and countless late-nights all comes down to a single moment. It's not the moment the new commercial is shown, it's the moment right after it's shown.
While distributors aren't advertising experts, like everybody else, they know what they like. Generally speaking, guy humor, attractive women, sports heroes, and hot music please them. In the few seconds after the ads run on enormous theater screens, the brewery guys are on pins and needles waiting for audience reaction. I've seen it range from stunned silence to thunderous applause. The former can mean there's going to be plenty of work ahead modifying ads that took so long to get to this point; the latter puts you in a good mood for the street party.
While distributors aren't advertising experts, like everybody else, they know what they like. Generally speaking, guy humor, attractive women, sports heroes, and hot music please them. In the few seconds after the ads run on enormous theater screens, the brewery guys are on pins and needles waiting for audience reaction. I've seen it range from stunned silence to thunderous applause. The former can mean there's going to be plenty of work ahead modifying ads that took so long to get to this point; the latter puts you in a good mood for the street party.
| It's a fair question whether distributor-response predicts success for marketing efforts. The assumption, of course, is that you'd rather see the field organization pumped up than not. And stories of "bad conventions" in the past serve to keep the drama high. But there have also been quite a few cases where distributors applauded ads that failed badly in-market. |  The author with unnamed client at a Coors distributor convention. |
No one who's ever been to a beer convention will soon forget the experience. It's the highlight of any beer guy's year. And maybe that alone makes all the effort worthwhile.
* "Partner" is probably the most often-used term at these conventions, but it is inaccurate. Beer distributors are individual businesses granted exclusive geographic territories by a brewer. They represent the "third tier" in a three-tier system (brewer-distributor-retailer) mandated after Prohibition. Had this mandate-- designed to keep brewers from controlling retailers, especially bars-- not been put in place, it's unlikely beer distributors as they exist today would've ever come into being. The distributors are generally free to "partner" with competing breweries (the exclusivity only goes one way), and virtually all of them do. It's a system that means most craft beer today rides to market on trucks effectively paid for by Big Beer. It could be reasonably argued that a real partner would be loyal to one brewer, as indeed many distributors were way back when.
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