The pendulum swings back

The correction was coming

Spirits hired for a boom. Home bars filled up during the pandemic, premium bottles sold through, and the houses staffed to match. Then the boom went into reverse, and the bill has been arriving ever since.

Brown-Forman cut 12% of its 5,400-person workforce in early 2025. Pernod Ricard set out to take €1 billion in costs out by its 2029 fiscal year and regrouped its brands into two divisions. LVMH’s wine and spirits arm moved to shrink its workforce by about 1,200 roles. Diageo, the largest of them all, averaged 27,938 full-time roles in fiscal 2026, down 6.4% from the year before, and has since announced a $1 billion savings program. On September 30, 305 more roles at its North American headquarters in New York ended.

None of this is a scandal. A house that grows into a boom has to shrink out of one, and the people in these seats are some of the best in the business. The question worth asking is what a brand keeps when they go.

Agencies, then in-house, then agencies again

Every brand team we’ve worked with has lived some version of this cycle. Work goes out to agencies. Costs climb, and leadership brings creative in-house for control and savings. The in-house team grows. Then a cost cycle arrives, internal headcount is the most visible line on the budget, and the work goes back out the door.

The Association of National Advertisers has measured the in-house half of that swing every five years since 2008. In-house agencies went from 42% of its members that year to 82% in 2023. In the same survey, 92% still used outside agencies, and work most often went out because the in-house team was too busy to take it. Eighty-eight percent said in-house workloads rose in the past year.

That matches what we saw from inside the houses. In-housing rarely replaced the agency. It added a layer between the brand and the agency, and the creatives hired into that layer spent their weeks in meetings, building decks and supervising the outside work they were brought in to replace.

What leaves with the headcount

Two things walk out when a house cuts marketing, and neither shows up on the savings slide.

The first is the field. Brand ambassadors carried a brand’s direction into the bars and brought the bar’s opinion back to the office. They knew which bartender in which city moved a room, and which menu placement meant something. When advocacy folds into sales, the order still gets written. The reason to reach for the bottle gets thinner.

The second is brand memory. Why the bottle gets lit from the side. Which serve the founder hates. The campaign that tested well and died in the bar. The bartender who first put it on a menu and still pours it. None of that lives in a brand book. It lives in people, and the ANA’s own respondents named better brand knowledge and institutional knowledge among the main benefits of an in-house team. A fast cut removes those first.

We know how much of that memory lives in individuals because one of us was it. At Rémy Cointreau, the cocktail photos Kyle shot on his phone and a Sony RX100 kept turning up in the brand’s agency work. He wasn’t a photographer yet. He was the person standing closest to the drinks, and the pictures showed it. That’s how photography became his job, and eventually how this studio started.

Who’s left holding the brand

After the cut, someone inherits everything. A brand manager now runs three portfolios. A social lead is briefing photography for the first time. A marketing director hired out of beer or packaged goods has never worked a bar shift. Every one of them is capable. None of them has the hours or the context the job used to come with.

You can see it in the work before you see it in the numbers. Briefs get shorter and vaguer. Agencies fill the gaps with category defaults: the slow pour, the smoky back bar, the leather armchair. Approval drifts from “does this look like us” to “does this look like spirits.” The bartenders were never in the brief, so they roll their eyes and reach for something else.

If that’s your desk right now, your judgment is fine. The math changed. The fix is to put the missing context back somewhere it can’t be cut again.

How to send the work back out without losing the brand

The pendulum is swinging toward outside partners again. Four things decide whether the brand survives the trip.

1. Hire people who already know the category. A partner who has worked a bar shift needs a one-page brief. A partner who hasn’t needs you to teach them the trade, and you no longer have the hours.

2. Write the brand’s memory down as a visual world. Lighting, serves, casting, and the things the brand never does. A visual world outlasts anyone’s tenure, and any partner can pick the brand up from it without starting over.

3. Buy one accountable team instead of four vendors. Every handoff between strategy, production, social and the trade is a place where context leaks, and nobody is left inside to catch it.

4. Test the work against the bar. Before anything ships, ask whether a bartender would pour it, post it or roll their eyes at it.

This end of the cycle is the one we built Ford Media Lab for. We came up inside the houses, Rachel as Tanqueray’s national brand ambassador at Diageo and Kyle helping build Rémy Cointreau’s Collectif 1806 program, and we’ve spent the ten years since making visual worlds for spirits brands from the outside. Real studio capture expanded through AI production gives a lean brand team the volume it used to need a department for. When a brand needs its field presence back, The LAB puts four former house ambassadors from Diageo, Rémy Cointreau, Pernod Ricard and Bacardi on it as one team.

The pendulum will swing back toward in-house someday, and the budgets will come back with it. Make sure someone still remembers the brand when they do.