The headline has said it all…Folks, we’re so bummed that we won’t be able to make a toast with you at the regional DRiNK Awards this year, but we'll be doing our best to bring the bar community even closer together with a little help from all of you.
The decision was hard for us to make, because the regional awards ceremonies are our way of coming to you and saying “we love and support you”. Together with our partner brands, we have connected and celebrated with thousands of bartenders, bar owners and more who attended these regional events in 13 cities in the last three years.
However, we’re challenged with the fact that brands are spending much less on marketing this year, and the precondition for the regional ceremonies to happen is that the costs for their production can be covered, which is sadly not the case at the moment.
With the planned dates for revealing regional winners fast approaching, we’ve realized the best solution is to move the Regional DRiNK Awards online. We will be streaming our six regional events on DRiNK’s WeChat Channel over three weeks from late September, with two regions for each streaming session. The schedule is as follows:
October 13: South + Central
So…see you online! The format has changed, but our goal remains the same – to celebrate China’s ever-evolving, dedicated and dynamic bar industry. We’d like to end this post with an open letter from Theo Watt, founder of DRiNK Awards, which delivers more details and insights on why we are making the shift this year.
That was how I started DRiNK Magazine in 2008, more than one year after I arrived in China, and that was DRiNK Magazine for me/us. There wasn’t a day when we weren’t challenged or that we worried about cashflow, and being secure, but at least we knew we were doing something cool, and we were part of something so much bigger than us.
Eight years of creating the magazine and executing many many events, pulling the trade together with our clients’ brands was exhilarating, and the best thing about it was no day was the same. The ideas were flowing, we could see our family of trade friends growing, and cocktails and bars becoming bigger and bigger in the expanse of this great land. At that moment (2016) we decided it was time to build an event that tied together the community of professionals we had been working with all those years, and we created ‘DMBA’ or now known as ‘The DRiNK Awards’.
The event enabled us to bring every facet of our industry into one room - the bartenders, brands, distributors, sales people, agencies, media, hotel partners, and so many more, and it was great. Year after year we expanded, so more and more of our industry could join, and we could afford to bring more and more international bartenders from all over the world to witness the magic of the China bar community.
In 2021 we decided to bring more events to our community and we started the regionals so that we could help bring the DRiNK Awards events to our family around the country and activate around 15 cities in the first three years. The cost and logistics to do this was a lot more than just doing one event and thankfully our brand partners followed, and we expanded to six regions in 2023 and had over 2,000 trade friends at all our different events in our last season.
But the ease out of covid as China re-introduced themselves to world has not been an easy one, and the aftermath has led our brand companies into very difficult times. A lot of our industry activity that you see, and that we have had the chance to be a part of, is funded in part by the higher margin products like cognac and whisky lending their larger margins to marketing activities across the portfolio. This is also why companies that do not carry a cognac (which carry 85% by value of the China market and whose margin cover a lot of marketing activity), have much less funds to dedicate to the trade (ex. Diageo). So, whenever we see a down-turn in activity, this can be due to global business affecting budgets from the top, but also can be affected by a down-turn in volume in cognac and higher margin whisk(e)y.
As we all know the economy in China and across the world is not in a great place, and this has affected sales both domestically with our own down-turn in volume, and in countries like the United States with whisk(e)y and cognac (second largest alcohol market in the world after China) which affects global marketing spends and China budgets too. Also, with certain geo political issues too, our three largest cognac brands in China (you know who they are) are facing tariffs and/or fines, still undecided but leaving a big question-mark on the category in China and therefore creating questionable times for those companies and needing to be very strict with their investment too.
All of these factors put together have meant that current brand investment has dropped significantly to a point that the brand partners find it harder to take part in all the activities that they want to, and with the DRiNK Award campaign costing quite a lot, we have been forced to make some difficult decisions in how we move forwards this year, so that we ensure that our trade still has this important program, that DRiNK stays alive as a business, and in-turn for our partners who want to carry on supporting the trade through our DA program can.
This year we will now be streaming our six regional events over three weeks, and our partner bars will stream these events in their venue. Through times of struggle, we should always try and find a positive, and come together as a community to ensure we can still celebrate with our colleagues and friends, and we feel that this is the best way to do it and see how you all come together to celebrate what you do in your different bars. Who knows it might be even better!
/On Air: North Regional DA 2022
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that actually the cocktail industry is doing very well, with vodka, gin, tequila, rum, and even Irish whiskey on a 25% or more YOY growth, so the great things you are doing in the cocktail sector is not to blame at all, and as a great friend of mine from a big company said to be recently, “you’re being blamed for doing a great job!” The reality is though that our industry is all connected, and sometimes areas that we have no control over, could still have control over us, and that is life. We have to make the best of what we have in front of us, and this is what we need to do to stay alive as a business, and to enable to still bring DRiNK Awards to all of you.
Lastly the one thing that will NOT change is our final pinnacle event. For the last two years we did this in March in Shanghai, but now seeing as our regional events will be moved into your bars across the country, we will bring the big DRiNK Awards pinnacle event forwards to the beginning of December (still to be decided), so that you don’t have to wait so long, and we get to see a lot of you hopefully in Shanghai then.
On that note, I hope this explanation opens your minds a little more to better understand how our industry plays, and I wish our community all the best as we navigate this time, and hope that you can all understand the reasons why we are doing what we are doing. We have dedicated our jobs to our community with an aim that our community one by one is turning their jobs into careers and livelihoods, and now we hope our community can support us and ensure that our China Bar Oscars can thrive on into the future.
One DRiNK. One Nation.
Founder of TWP, DRiNK Magazine & DRiNK Awards
