There's a headline that's been doing the rounds for a few years now: Britain is falling out of love with alcohol. The reality is more nuanced, and for brands, far more useful. People are still drinking, they're just drinking less often, choosing more carefully and expecting more from every pint, glass or serve they pay for.
That puts real pressure on how alcohol brands spend their media budgets. Duty is rising, regulation is tight, and every brand now competes with the alcohol-free shelf beside it as well as its usual rivals. Volume of spend alone won't win that fight; knowing where your drinker is, and what mood they're in when they choose, will.
The idea that drinking is in freefall doesn't hold up. IWSR's latest Bevtrac survey puts UK alcohol participation at a steady 82%. What has changed is how much people drink when they do: across the markets IWSR tracks, drinks per occasion fell from 4.4 to 3.9 this year (IWSR).
The "Gen Z doesn't drink" narrative is outdated. UK Gen Z drinking participation has risen to 76%, up from 66% three years ago (IWSR). They drink in bigger groups, earlier in the evening, and lean towards cocktails -Bacardi's 2026 Cocktail Trends Report ranked the Spritz as Gen Z's number one, while the nation's favorite, the gin and tonic, didn't make their top ten (City AM).
Guinness shows what happens when a brand earns its way into that culture. Rituals like "splitting the G", a flood of user-generated content and a moderate 4.1% ABV have helped make it one in every seven pints served in London, according to Diageo (Drinks Intel). Much of that came from content the brand didn't pay for -in a category with strict ad rules, being worth talking about matters as much as the media plan.
Among UK adults who drink, 36% now drink low and no alcohol products regularly or occasionally, and most still drink full-strength too. 2025 was a record year for alcohol-free beer, with 200 million pints sold (Morning Advertiser), and "zebra striping" alternating alcoholic and alcohol-free drinks in one session has gone mainstream.
GLP-1 medication is accelerating the shift. Around 10% of UK adults now report using it, and Drinkaware found users drink alcohol 29% less often and spend 30% less per on-trade trip. Yet 71% still say alcohol is central to social occasions -they're just choosing smaller serves, lower ABV and alcohol-free options (Morning Advertiser). For media, that makes 0.0 variants more than a product line: they reach moments the full-strength brand can’t and recruit new drinkers to the masterbrand.
All of this is happening against rising costs. Alcohol duty rose 3.66% on 1 February 2026 across every category, including draught (GOV.UK), and when price goes up, drinkers need a stronger reason to pay the premium. Add some of the strictest advertising rules in UK media: no appeal to under-18s, no link to social success, plus platform restrictions on top and it's clear why earned, creator-led and sponsorship activity has become so important.
Retail media is the biggest structural shift in alcohol planning. WARC expects alcoholic drinks brands globally to put 55.8% of their media investment into retail media networks by 2027 (WARC). Tesco Media found 76% of basket items are new, lapsed or occasional rather than habitual (The Grocer), and in beer, wine and spirits, where so many decisions are made in the aisle, that visibility matters.
But retail media is the closer. Its job is conversion, and it mostly harvests demand built elsewhere. Lean on it too hard and drinkers learn to wait for the next multibuy, and the brand starts to look like a discount.
The strongest alcohol campaigns of 2026 have borrowed from culture, leaned on heritage and taken alcohol-free seriously.
Beefeater 0.0 recreated Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity video to launch "Get More With 0.0", framing moderation as getting more from a night out rather than less (The Drum). Pernod Ricard says 75% of Beefeater 0.0 shoppers are new to the brand, and 15% go on to buy Beefeater Dry (The Drinks Business).
Heineken 0.0 went bolder, renaming the Bakerloo line the "Bakerl0.0 line" with TfL for Dry January (Time Out). It earned huge attention, but disability charity Transport for All warned the altered signage risked confusing passengers who rely on it (Metal Packager) -fame shouldn't come at the expense of someone getting home.
We've seen the same principles work first-hand. For a challenger wine brand recruiting new drinkers into the category, we built a culturally led August Bank Holiday campaign that avoided traditional wine advertising altogether. Large-format OOH created fame across five UK cities, DOOH placed the brand around Notting Hill Carnival, All Points East, Manchester Pride and Leeds Festival, and paid social mirrored that footprint, while retail-proximity media and mobile retargeting carried attention through to purchase. The result was +2.2% value growth year-on-year across the campaign weeks, sustained afterwards despite three fewer feature spaces in store -and a +54.5% sales uplift on its lead variant.
All of this puts more focus on the media planner. An alcohol brief often arrives built around an age group, a summer burst and a big retailer partnership. The planner's role is to challenge that, to ask which occasions the brand should own, whether that's pre-drinks, the Sunday pub lunch or the Dry January reset, which version of the brand belongs in each, and how every channel will do the job it's best at.
That means building compliance into the idea from the start, treating 0.0 variants as a way into moments the core brand can't reach, and setting a clear split between brand building and retail media, measured on incrementality rather than return on ad spend alone. Social and creators spark the conversation, TV and sponsorship build memory and credibility, and retail media closes.
Britain isn't giving up on drinking - it's drinking more deliberately. The brands that win will understand when and why people choose to drink and show up in each of those moments with something made for it.
Interested in a conversation about how we can help your alcohol brand cut through? Get in touch with the team today.
Written by: Orla Sweeney
