• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, May 28, 2013

Market leaders in the alcohol sector are being left behind in social video marketing because they’re not optimizing their content for the social Web, according to a new report from video tech company Unruly.

Overall, video sharing in the alcohol sector increased 1,593% from Q4 2012 to Q1 2013, but 97% of the total alcohol-ad shares across the social Web in this year’s first quarter came from just four ads, or fewer than 1% of the alcohol ads released in that quarter, says the report.

Budweiser’s “Brotherhood” Super Bowl video (with 2.42 million shares) accounted for a full 59.2% of total Q1 video shares for the category. 

A controversial video dubbed “Bad Motherf***er,” from little-known Russian-Austrian vodka brand Neft (with 976,383 shares) pulled 23.9% of the category’s total Q1 video shares. 

Carlsberg’s “Puts Friends to the Test” pulled 8.1% of all video shares (332,291), and Heinken’s “The Candidate” had a 6.1% share (250,875).

Beyond those, Bud Light’s “Platinum” and Guinness’s “Clock” each pulled 0.4% of the category’s total Q1 video shares (with nearly 16,000 and nearly 15,000, respectively). 

Four other videos each pulled 0.2% portions of alcohol ads’ total shares: a Guinness St. Patrick’s Day video; Heineken’s “Déjà Vu”; Beck’s “Sapphire”; and Amstel’s “La 9a Sinfonia de V. Caballer.” 

AB InBev increased video shares from 8% in Q4 2012 to 59% in Q1 2013, but the share of voice of beer brand videos as a whole declined to 75% in Q1, versus 97% in Q4 2012. 

Unruly attributes this to video-sharing gains by spirits brands, noting that “underdog” brands are leading social video within the spirits category (and that spirits sales are growing at a 3.7% CAGR, outstripping both beer and wine sales performance).
Wine brands remain the slowest to embrace social video, attracting less than 1% of the sharing activity during both quarters.

“Some of the big alcohol brands – and subsectors – are vastly underperforming in social video,” said Ian Forrester, insight director for Unruly. “For wine and spirit brands, the opportunity to increase brand awareness and sales conversion rates through social video is huge, as there has been very little mass movement from these brands in creating shareable video content. Additionally, leading brands like Diageo and SAB Miller that have very strong market share are lagging behind competitors when it comes to social video share of voice.”

The research also found that the top 10 alcohol video ads averaged two minutes and 16 seconds in length. Among the top 10 alcohol videos in Q1 2013, only one (Beck’s “Sapphire”) was 30 seconds long.

The full Q1 report, showing social video advertising sharing statistics for various key categories including alcohol, can be downloaded through Unruly’s site.