Suntory Global Spirits UK

Suntory Global Spirits UK manages the sales, marketing and distribution of a massive portfolio of premium spirits, including Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark, and Laphroaig.

The Challenge

In January 2021, Automated Creative was tasked with launching a brand-new flavour of Jim Beam — Jim Beam Peach — into select ASDA stores. The brief from Suntory Global Spirits UK was clear: maximise offline sales through an online social media campaign that would create maximum buzz and deliver financial results.

The context made it considerably harder. The UK was in lockdown. And the launch window itself sat in the middle of winter — the moment of the year when a peach-flavoured summer serve is furthest from the average shopper's mind.

Working alongside partner agency Bright Signals, Automated Creative had to bridge the gap between digital attention and physical retail behaviour. The ad campaigns needed to do more than look good. They had to drive measurable sales uplift in specific ASDA stores, while generating the kind of consumer insight that could shape future ad campaigns for one of the world's biggest spirits brands.

In other words, this couldn't be a glossy launch piece. It had to be a working sales engine, built on online ad optimisation, sharp audience targeting and continuous learning.

Key Obstacles

"The AC approach for the Jim Beam Peach campaign delivered value far above expectations, the buzz it created internally was incredibly exciting. The sales success also helped secure additional listings for Jim Beam Peach in other retailers later in the year. The use case for automation and insight generation will have a lasting effect on how we do business on the world's best selling bourbon."

Julie Pender

Interim Manager Bourbons, Suntory Global Spirits UK

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The Strategy

Suntory Global Spirits UK needed evidence that would drive its creative output and prove that online ad campaigns could shift bottles off shelves. To do that, the work had to be designed around two clearly defined audiences and a creative engine capable of producing — and learning from — ad assets at scale.

The first audience was a broad national audience with a general interest in whisky, designed to build awareness of Jim Beam Peach and prime the wider UK market. The second was a tightly geo-targeted audience drawn from ASDA stores with traditionally strong Jim Beam sales — Nottingham, Leeds, Belfast, Doncaster and Newcastle — where the campaign needed to convert attention into checkout behaviour.

That split made it possible to optimise ads differently for each audience, run separate hypotheses in parallel and learn what triggered each group to act. The national audience could be tested on broader brand messaging; the geo-targeted audience could be served sharper, more locally relevant targeted ads designed to drive in-store purchase.

Using AC's proprietary tool, the team produced over 150 individual online ads — a volume of ad content variation that simply isn't viable through traditional production. Each variant tested a different combination of visual, message and tone, so the campaign could quickly identify which creative triggers actually moved consumers and double down on what worked.

Crucially, every ad was tracked across both audiences. That meant the team didn't just learn which ads performed — they generated valuable insight into what creative triggers drove consumer actions, and could see how those triggers behaved differently at national level versus inside the geo-targeted footprint. The work effectively turned the launch into its own ad optimisation tool, feeding live ad insights straight back into how Suntory Global Spirits UK could optimise campaigns and scale ads against real consumer behaviour.

+20%

Sales Uplift

When compared against global forecast
+42%

Additional Sales

In geo-targeted ASDA stores
35%

Cheaper CPLC

When compared against benchmark
163.57%

Increase in Ad Recalls

When measured at national level

The Result

"The AC approach for the Jim Beam Peach campaign delivered value far above expectations, the buzz it created internally was incredibly exciting."

Julie Pender, Interim Manager Bourbons, Suntory Global Spirits UK

The first thing the work did was beat the forecast. Despite launching a summer drink in winter, in the middle of lockdown, Jim Beam Peach delivered a 20% sales uplift versus forecast at a national level. That alone would have been a strong outcome — but the geo-targeted activity delivered an additional 42% sales increase on top of the national lift, in the five ASDA stores chosen for focused targeted ads. Online attention was translating directly into offline behaviour, exactly as the campaign optimisation strategy had set out to prove.

The media efficiency story was just as compelling. The campaign came in 35% cheaper on CPLC than benchmark, while delivering more than triple the impressions for the national audience and more than double the impressions for the geo-targeted audience. Every pound of paid media worked harder, reaching more of the right people and doing so at a meaningfully lower cost than business-as-usual digital ad campaigns would have predicted.

Engagement and recall told the same story. The campaign drove 163.57% more ad recalls at national level, embedding Jim Beam Peach in the minds of UK whisky drinkers far beyond what a standard launch would deliver. And in the geo-targeted locations, the work generated 104.87% more clicks among the targeted audience — a clear signal that the locally-tuned ad creative was cutting through and prompting action, not just impressions.

The bigger win, though, sat beyond the launch window. Producing 150+ ad variants across two distinct audiences and tracking creative triggers across both gave Suntory Global Spirits UK a library of evidence about what its consumers actually respond to. That bank of ad insights reshaped how the team could approach future campaign optimisation, giving the brand a far sharper starting point for the next round of ad campaign ideas, digital campaign ideas and creative briefs.

The buzz the work created — internally at Suntory Global Spirits UK and externally with consumers — was a result in its own right. And the commercial follow-through was just as telling: the strength of the launch helped secure additional listings for Jim Beam Peach in other retailers later that year, turning a single ASDA activation into a wider retail story for the brand.

For Suntory Global Spirits UK, the Jim Beam Peach launch became a proof point for how online ad optimisation, targeted ads and continuous testing could optimise ad creative live, scale ads efficiently and create ideas for advertising campaigns rooted in real consumer behaviour rather than instinct.

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Jim Beam Peach successfully launched by optimising digital campaigns

The Challenge

Key Obstacles

The Strategy

+20%

+42%

35%

163.57%

The Result

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