Tariff Dust Up Creates Generational DTC Food, Wine & Spirits Opportunity According to Media Fixer

Los Angeles, CA, April 29, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Tariffs are nothing new to the American landscape. The radical shift in approach of Trump 2.0 is, and the potential impact to businesses across the globe can best be described as uncertain. Is the president postering? Will other nations call his bluff? Will countries bend the knee? What will the economic impact be on manufactured goods outside the US? Time will tell according to Media Fixer.

With every setback comes new opportunity. Newton’s Third Law of Action Reaction. The American food and beverage industry has a new and unexpected opportunity with Trump’s Tariff War. Wine, spirits, specialty beef, seafood, chicken, fruit and veg, if domestically produced, have a sales and marketing advantage in at least the short-term as consumers pivot toward them based on affordability and supply. The recent drop in inflation and lowered gas prices should add additional margins for these brands.  

When Chilean sea bass, Canadian lobster, Australian and Mexican beef and French Champagne or Italian wines cost 30% more than their American counterparts US consumers, given the ability, will pivot quickly based on pricing necessity to American products. The question…is your business set up to capitalize on this disruptive marketing opportunity?  

DTC OR BRANDING? 
For immediate sales growth, direct to consumer is the better candidate to capture new customers during this disruption. Why? DTC consumer marketing circumvents retail, eliminates middle costs charged by retail partners, delivers immediate revenue and allows in-house marketing teams to own data and develop long term loyalty programs to extend lifetime customer value. DTC doesn’t negate branding either. Brick and mortar should report incremental sales from well executed DTC programs.  

Branding campaigns leave new customer acquisition to chance. Branding will elevate foot traffic at retail, but isn’t that just sending your potential customer into an environment you don’t control, where dozens of offers, discounts and product choices have been crarefully crafted to influence purchasing behaviors?

How do you affordably and quickly drive DTC scale for omnichannel success? 

MAKING TV AFFORDABLE 
A Super Bowl ad in 2025 cost $8 million for thirty seconds. That is not what I’m proposing here. Quite the opposite. Performance TV media buying, aka Biddable TV, allows marketers to execute TV media planning similar to digital media buys. Frequency, audience size, HHI, gender, age, are but just a few metrics that can be applied to build bespoke media plans for linear TV. The best part, this media strategy acquires airings for 40-70% off upfront costs, and if your set bid amount is exceeded, you don’t spend anything. It’s a fantastic way to ensure media costs align with KPIs. 

What about reaching cord cutters? Well, over 80% of all cord cutter platforms (i.e AppleTV, Roku, YouTubeTV, Sling) are utilizing linear TV feeds for their live programming. It’s easy to recognize a linear TV feed within a cord cutter device. If you see a commercial longer than 30 seconds, you are watching a linear TV feed. How do you take adavntage of this? You need a media buyer that knows how to purchase at the linear source. Not an easy feat.

Performance TV not only reaches consumers under 35 years of age at scale, it does so with linear TV CPMs that are frequently $12/CPM and lower. This is why you see TV commercials for Nuts.com, Good Ranchers, Misfits Markets and the like. The low cost to deliver CAC en masse is unlike any other form of advertising. 

Additional benefits of Biddable TV is the flexibility to make weekly changes to media plans based on performance analysis and attribution tied to conversions and each airing. Also, this media can be cancelled and refunded within fairly short windows. If a campaign is simply not hitting your KPIs, it can be taken off air within just a few days. This approach also shouldn’t require your company to get locked into an extended AOR relationship to execute a DTC TV campaign, nor compete with your current brand AOR. It’s simply another marketing channel.  

SATISFYING BRAND AND PERFORMANCE  
There is also a Mixed Media approach to Performance TV marketing that can be layered in to satisfy brand teams. With a combination of upfront, scatter TV media, local media, and streaming apps/networks, audience brand requirements for GRPs and CPMs can be obtained in the performance model and create robust weekly media schedules that take advantage of dayparts, specific programming, prime and unsold premium inventory. It’s just an additional way of testing and scaling the campaign actually. The impact will increase engagement for SEO, social media, at retail, at your brand website, with online retail partners, and just about everywhere else you have positioned your brand. 

WHO IS SUITED FOR PERFORMANCE TV  
Companies generating $5m-$20m in annual revenue and have trouble scaling beyond, an initial AOV of approximaetly $200, and have rock solid fulfillment and customer service should test this strategy. They’re also going to need a 30 and 15 second video creative, and most companies have existing content to edit together a performance focused commercial for a modest investment.   

Express shipping is also critical for the food and beverage category. The best seafood perceived is fresh seafood, even if it’s flash frozen. With wine and spirits, not having overnight shipping is an invitation for consumers to not order from your brand and instead visit their local retail store and choose from the dozens of competitive options. Fulfillment can be expensive and consider pricing this expense into your product. A DTC consumer is far more likely to accept free or inexpensive overnight shipping and pay a higher product price. Amazon has built its entire Prime business around this concept.  

THE LONG TERM VALUE OF A DTC CHANNEL  
What is the value of a DTC channel? It goes far beyond just revenue growth. First, if you are a commercially focused enterprise and can sell DTC, you should develop it for company stability. So much of the food and beverage industry is heavily reliant on hospitality, commercial and wholesale. There has been significant contraction during the last several years across all these, and this reliance has forced marketeres to accept the concept that markets can never shrink or decline. A growth philosophy is much more realistic. Diminished foot traffic post-Covid still negatively affects retail. Toss in the addition of Ozempic, inflation and supply chain issues, and it’s bewildering why DTC initiatives aren’t the norm.  

With DTC channel ownership, 1P data can be owned and built into additional mid and lower funnel data driven content marketing opportunities that can help drive acquisition and help Loyalty and Rewards programs shorten repeat sales cycles and revive dormant customers.  

A successful DTC channel delivers immediate growth, then scale, then long-term stability by extending lifetime values. If you can extend this into creating generational brand loyalty, the kind shared between family members and friends, you will have built a brand icon. Isn’t that the real goal?  

I don’t have a crystal ball to know how these tariff threats will play out. It’s my opinion that I believe the Trump Tariffs will be amicably solved in the next thirty to sixty days. Why? Americans and markets won’t tolerate this type of volatility. Both will quickly grow tired of negotiations through threats and tantrums. If markets decline, retirement accounts stagnate and people start saving instead of spending. That leads to an unforced error by Trump and recession. I do believe Team Trump will reverse or soften course and avoid that misstep.  All Presidents, especially new ones, are easily swayed when the electorate that voted them into office begins to turn the other cheek. Still, companies that sit on the sidelines in this moment of disruption will likely regret it. Like Covid, those that act early on DTC, will quickly reap the rewards. 

Booking information: rebecca@honeypr.co
Learn more about Michael Pierce at michaelpierce.tv