Laura Grassulini:  In our previous column, we interrogated ourselves on the status of cocktail competitions and on the future of on-trade advocacy. We’ve set value as the ultimate, collective benchmark, so the question naturally arises: what value is advocacy supposed to deliver, and is it delivering it?

In corporate terms, on-trade advocacy falls under the marketing umbrella as a set of strategies and activities designed to build relationships with hospitality operators - relationships that can create advocates for their brands in bartenders. Bartenders influence consumer choices at the bar directly, one guest at a time, and that aforementioned relationship is healthier when brands support those bartenders through engaging programmes that respond to their various needs and ambitions – covering technical areas as well as personal and professional development and eventually broadening career perspectives.

Today, advocacy is more relevant than ever for the bar community. Last year, a global survey on the status of the hospitality industry conducted by Celebrate Her, Allara and CGA revealed a critical period in staff retention at 4-10 years into careers, where shortfalls in work-life balance and welfare alongside a lack of development, career pathways and training tools were driving hospitality workers away from the sector. The Global Bartender Report 2025 by BarSights also reported how highly bartenders value brands whose training activities and activations can help them grow their knowledge, craft and network. While drinks brands cannot and are not expected to fix hospitality staff retention and welfare issues, they often do become an external resource for employers.

But necessities change, as has the way we consume information and acquire knowledge and skills. With such a prominent shift to digital content-forward advocacy platforms, the risk is that education and development get scrolled past instead of digested and absorbed. We’ve all more-or-less become accustomed to immediacy, digital shortcuts and bidimensional glimpses into glamourised experiences. So, in an industry where most resources and opportunities are presented in a bite-sized Instagram reel, how can we ensure new generations are motivated to build knowledge and expertise over time rather than just being fed with aspirations of a big social following and an easy, jet set lifestyle?

Danil Nevsky:  Let me make a distinction. Surface-level content is not the enemy. It is the entry point. The internet is not going away, and short-form content is now the front door of education, not its replacement. If nobody sees your educational programme on socials, it does not exist.

Surface content creates awareness. Awareness creates participation. Participation creates development.

The real failure is not that surface-level content exists. The real failure is when brands create attention without building infrastructure behind it. Short-form content should function as a gateway, not a substitute. The brands that understand how to connect attention to structure will build the strongest ecosystems. The brands that fail to do so will create visibility without substance.

Content itself is not the problem; disconnected systems are. Advocacy can provide education and access, but advocacy cannot replace experience. The bartenders who succeed long term are not simply the most visible. They are the ones who accumulate knowledge, experience, relationships, and judgment over time. Advocacy can accelerate exposure, but it does not replace mastery.

What’s mostly changed in the past few years is that advocacy has become tied to corporate, measurable metrics and such metrics have become easy to calculate: visibility, reach, engagement. However, human development is not measurable. Social media has not created this shift, but has simply made influence more easily measurable. Corporate systems naturally optimise for what they can assess. You cannot easily measure how much a bartender has improved, but you can measure social reach and views. Advocacy has not stopped educating and serving bartenders, but it has begun to do so in ways that also serve business validation.

The real value of advocacy is not what happens immediately after a seminar. It is what happens five years later. When a brand supports 12 bartenders and five years later those 12 bartenders are running 12 venues across a city, that original investment has multiplied exponentially. That is advocacy. But that cannot be measured in quarterly reports.

Advocacy is not media investment. It is a human investment. The brands that understand this do not simply build placements. They build ecosystems. They build loyalty that compounds across entire careers.  

Advocacy cannot be optimised like advertising because its value emerges over decades, not reporting cycles.

LG:  And that is precisely why advocacy can work, and we must continue to make it work through multi-layered and multi-year programmes built to provide continuity despite the changes and uncertainties. Through qualitative and not just quantitative evaluation. Through people and not just content.