The Campaign Mechanic
Jim Beam is entering the 2026 NFL season with a campaign built around an involuntary game event: the field-goal "doink." When a kick strikes the goalpost, fans who have registered at Hitthebeam.com are entered to win an 85-inch TV, with up to five sets awarded per week. Non-winning entries roll over, so every doink compounds the prize pool's urgency. It is a live-trigger sweepstakes model — audience participation is tied to an unscripted, unpredictable moment in the game — and it runs the full regular season.
The creative centers on actor-comedian Ben Marshall playing an absurdly underqualified kicking coach opposite former NFL kicker Kai Forbath, tasked with training a professional to miss on purpose. The spot debuted September 9 ahead of the NFL kickoff game and will run across CTV, Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube. Jim Beam has also produced limited-edition bottles for three NFL franchise partners — the Seattle Seahawks, Dallas Cowboys, and Kansas City Chiefs — available at select local retailers, adding a retail activation layer to the digital-first campaign.
What Operators Should Track
For on-premise operators and spirits buyers, the structural move here is worth more attention than the creative. Jim Beam is using real-time sports events as media triggers — a technique that has been gaining traction in programmatic and CTV buying as live sports inventory becomes increasingly addressable. Rather than running a static seasonal spot, the brand has built a reason for fans to re-engage with its digital touchpoints every single week, driven by an event that happens organically inside content they are already watching.
Regan Clarke, VP of American Whiskey at Suntory Global Spirits, framed the campaign around the brand's longstanding positioning around shared moments: "When the ball finds the beam, it doesn't matter which jersey you're wearing — we can all raise a Jim Beam and Lemonade together." That RTD callout is deliberate. Jim Beam and Lemonade is a ready-to-drink format, and embedding it into a high-visibility campaign signals that Suntory is using the NFL platform to build awareness for its RTD portfolio alongside the flagship bourbon.
Signals for Spirits and Venue Buyers
For bar and restaurant operators running spirits programs, campaigns like this one create a short window of consumer pull that savvy buyers can amplify on-premise. When a nationally promoted sweepstakes is driving consumers to think about a specific brand during live game broadcasts, well-timed menu placement, digital menu callouts, or staff suggestive selling can convert that ambient awareness into a pour. The franchise-specific limited-edition bottles also give retailers a localized merchandising hook that operators in Seahawks, Cowboys, or Chiefs markets can request from their distributor rep.
The broader pattern — spirits brands anchoring seasonal campaigns to live sports, distributing across CTV and social simultaneously, and adding a sweepstakes mechanic to drive first-party data capture — is accelerating across the beverage alcohol category. Operators who understand the media calendar their suppliers are running can time programming, LTO promotions, and staff training to align with periods of peak brand investment, extracting more value from distributor partnerships without additional marketing spend of their own.
For suppliers and agencies evaluating similar activations, the Jim Beam model demonstrates how live-event triggers can replace static seasonal creative with always-on consumer engagement tied to earned media moments — every doink is, effectively, a free media event.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
