Most BevAlc Media Plans Are Solving for the Wrong Problem

The Retail Majority is the 96% of alcohol retailers that aren't big box: independent liquor stores, regional chains, specialty retailers, and local grocers. They drive most BevAlc transactions in the U.S. And for a long time, they've been largely invisible to how media gets planned, measured, and optimized.

We call it the Retail Majority because it reflects where transactions actually happen, not just where media has historically been easiest to measure.

For years, that gap defined the industry. Suppliers invested where they could prove performance, which concentrated dollars in a small set of environments even though most purchases were happening elsewhere. Nobody was ignoring the Retail Majority on purpose. The infrastructure just didn't exist to do anything about it.

That's what's changed.

The problem was never the retailers. It was the plumbing.

Independent and regional retailers weren't accessible at scale. Even though they drove the majority of transactions, they weren't something you could realistically plan against. So media dollars flowed to the platforms that could support scale and measurement, not the ones closest to where buying decisions were being made.

The dollars were coming from the long tail. The media wasn't.

That's started to change. Independent stores are adopting ecommerce, modern POS, and loyalty systems that capture real purchase behavior. Platforms like City Hive and BottleCapps are now widely used across the category. But these retailers are still fragmented across thousands of separate environments, and data spread across thousands of environments is still data you can't act on.

What marketers need is a layer that connects the long tail: one that aggregates purchase data, inventory, and audience insights across independent and regional retail into a single, plannable environment. That's what Surfside built. It's what makes it possible to activate plans across the Retail Majority as a whole, rather than store by store.

From there, the rest follows. Reach real category and competitor buyers. Influence decisions at the digital shelf. Extend those audiences offsite. Measure performance against actual transactions, not just clicks or impressions.

Most media plans are still solving for a problem that no longer exists.

Even with all of this in place, most BevAlc media plans haven't caught up. They're still built around where measurement has historically been easiest, not where transactions actually happen. That mismatch has quietly shaped budget allocation for years, and most suppliers haven't stopped to question it.

It's no longer a technology problem. It's a strategic one.

If the majority of purchases are happening within independent and regional retail, and those environments are now measurable and accessible at scale, the way dollars are distributed should reflect that. Continuing to optimize around a subset of the market isn't conservative. It's incomplete.

The plumbing is in place. The question is whether suppliers adjust their strategy to reflect that, or keep optimizing around an incomplete picture of the market.