Dive Brief:

• Patrón Spirits is working with location-data provider Foursquare to pinpoint categories of customers and push drink recommendations to bar and restaurant customers. The tequila brand is using foot-traffic data collected from 12 million Foursquare users from the past three years in 100 cities and developing algorithms to sharpen its mobile advertising, according to Adweek.
• Patrón categorizes consumers into two groups called “bros,” who are social consumers looking for a place to relax in the evening, while “knows” are more cultivated in their tastes. Foursquare used Patrón’s psychographic and demographic information and then added location data to track consumers’ whereabouts and help the tequila brand to suggest personalized cocktails when consumers are in bars or restaurants. Reviews that consumers write also help to build their user profile.
• Adrian Parker, vice president of digital for Patrón, told Adweek that 235,000 users have connected with the brand through its year-old Patrón Cocktail Lab, which has a library of cocktail recipes and content and a skill for Amazon’s intelligent assistant Alexa.

Dive Insight:

Patrón is demonstrating its ability to dive deeper into data collected from social media, compared with recent campaigns of other alcohol brands. Malibu, the coconut-flavored rum marketed by Pernod Ricard, launched its “101 Days of Because Summer” campaign that depends more on social influencers from mobile and digital channels than it does data. Earlier this month, the Mexico-based tequila brand announced plans for its "Patrón the Summer" cocktail tour to visit concerts, culinary events and festivals across the U.S. with a “bar on wheels” that lets consumers get cocktail recommendations from a touchscreen interface.

The tour follows its research with Foursquare and social media listening to understand consumer habits and serve up 30 customized tequila cocktails based on consumers' individual tastes. The brand also created the Patrón Bot-Tender, a chatbot cocktail recipe service that appears on PatronTequila.com, Facebook Messenger and Twitter Direct Message.

The brand’s summer promotion is another sign that alcohol brands are beginning to overcome fears of marketing on popular apps and channels whose audience is comprised of a large group of people under 21. The beer and liquor industries have enacted regulations against placing ads on any media channel whose audience is less than 71.6% of people legally allowed to drink. Several years ago, Facebook agreed to show ads from spirits maker Diageo, which was quite profitable. However, many consumers were concerned that because the social networking site's audience includes underage people, the ads would only fuel underage drinking by exposing young people to alcohol marketing online. The alcohol business has had to rely on imperfect age-gating tools throughout its history, but Patrón is ensuring its ads reach only those above 21 through the demographic data from Foursquare.