Another week. Another bar show. Another cocktail week. Another symposium. Another convention. Same startenders. Same seminars. Same topics. Same swag. Same brands. Same complaints.

In 2021, I started an online bar event calendar. The idea was to have a simple, easy-to-access, synchronised-straight-to-your-smartphone calendar that everyone can use to plan their year. In 2021 we had 14 bar events around the world. In 2025 we have 68.

Yet it doesn’t seem like the industry expanded by 400%. In fact, brand ambassadors and teams are getting cut left, right and centre. Stocks of all major companies are down. The Cocktail Trading Co in London recently held a week of takeovers in memoriam of all the bars London lost in the last 12 months.

But you might be wondering how we got here.

It’s 2016. You’re a brand ambassador for Diageo or Bacardi, stuck in a three-hour meeting to discuss this year’s World Class or Bacardi Legacy global finals. The annual advocacy budget is about a million and 90% goes into the competition.

Fast forward to a brand performance review some years after – sales are down, market share is stagnant, bartenders aren’t turning up to brand workshops and the new marketing plan is focusing on a listing in that bar in your city that got into 50 Best. Your advocacy budget gets cut.

You’re texting your bar manager friends asking them how you could collaborate. They want to go to Tales of the Cocktail, you look back at your marketing budget – best you can do is Athens Bar Show.

Every other brand office in the city is stuck in the same position. So, you fly to Greece for the greatest guest shift you’ve hosted in years. The event numbers are through the roof. Everyone in the brand team is happy and you get your bonus. Next year you plan to go bigger. Why change a winning formula, right? Why would you ever go back to big and expensive advocacy and cocktail competition programmes?

A different view

Let’s flip the perspective. You’re a bar owner from Bangkok who’s been invited to The Clumsies mega events in Athens. It has just been named a top 10 bar in the world and it’s not even in a massive destination city. You wonder what the secret is. You wonder how it got the budgets to bring all these big players. Then it hits you – brands sponsoring the bar show and surrounding activities and some 10,000 bartenders attending. Some even paid for tickets.

What you don’t consider is that you and every other bar owner have had the same realisation. So, all of you take your bags and fly home with an idea. Bangkok Bar Show, Baltic Bar Show, Mirror Bar Expo, Maybe Cocktail Festival… This year, we have had 68 bar shows, 1 every 5.3 days.

Brand advocacy budgets are finite and every year they’re squeezed harder. The number of bar shows can’t keep growing, cannibalising existing visitor numbers. They need to expand local recruitment and open their doors to the public.

Barometer Bar Show in Ukraine was the fastest-growing European bar show prior to the war, attracting huge numbers with a unique model – the show was split between professionals and consumers. During the day, bar professionals could come to the show for seminars hosted in a 1,000-capacity hall and after 6pm the doors would open to the public for the cocktail festival.

To lower ticket costs for both groups, you were given a plastic card that could be preloaded with money. If you wanted a cocktail, you had to pay for it at a discount – this made getting hammered financially possible but discouraged.

The show then got a cut of sales, lowering ticket prices for bartenders. Brands were able to target both the industry and consumers at the same time – it was a win-win. The bar show invested heavily in both digital and traditional PR in Kyiv to help pack the event. This is the way.

We can’t change the fact that cocktail competitions are declining. We can’t influence corporate behaviour with advocacy teams. Agencies will continue to cater to brand needs and the obsession with awards isn’t going anywhere, but if bar show organisers are driven by the desire to elevate the bartending profession, if they want to shine a light on their local bar scene, attract international bars to come visit their market sponsored by brands, or even if they are simply driven by the cause of making some money, the way forward is to overlap with the general public.