.svg)
.png)
Campari is using Negroni Week 2026 to push its "Stay Bitter" platform into a more ambitious phase, recruiting actor, producer and host Alan Cumming to lead "The Bitter Nine", a group of creative figures positioned around individuality and an appetite for things that are not universally palatable.
The campaign, unveiled on 21 September as the 14th annual Negroni Week began, takes inspiration from Campari's 1970s "9 out of 10,000" advertising, which played with the idea that only a small number of people were sufficiently bold or sophisticated to appreciate the aperitif's bitterness. The modern interpretation shifts that provocation away from exclusivity and towards self-expression.
Cumming is joined by Jimmy Gia Huy, Helena Barquet, Jonah Reider, Angel Sipilia, Nikki Ogunnaike, Fabiana Faria, Julie Reiner and Jalil Johnson. Collectively, Campari says the group represents entertainment, fashion, media, food and beverage, hospitality and photography. The brand has framed them less as conventional endorsers and more as people with distinctive creative viewpoints, although detailed individual campaign roles have not been publicly set out.
That distinction matters.
For alcohol marketers, the strategic value is not simply that Campari has hired a recognisable actor. The more interesting move is the transition from celebrity-led advertising to a talent ecosystem built around a brand idea.
In 2025, Campari's Negroni Week activity centred on Sarah Michelle Gellar and a limited-edition Stay Bitter merchandise collection, with clothing and accessories priced between US$40 and US$70. The programme also incorporated trade events in Los Angeles and New York and outdoor advertising at Penn Station.
A year later, the company has retained the same strategic territory but changed the execution. Instead of replacing "Stay Bitter" with a new annual campaign, Campari has widened the existing platform and connected it with a larger group of cultural voices.
For brand owners, that is arguably the bigger lesson than the casting itself. A repeatable platform can accumulate meaning. A succession of unrelated celebrity campaigns usually has to buy attention again from zero.
The strongest part of the strategy is that "Stay Bitter" originates in the liquid rather than in an interchangeable lifestyle proposition.
Campari's bitter taste is a product characteristic. It is also a characteristic that naturally divides opinion. The campaign turns that potential barrier into a marker of personality: liking bitterness becomes shorthand for embracing character, difference and creative independence.
That gives Campari several layers of communication from one brand asset. At product level, bitterness describes taste. At cocktail level, it helps distinguish the Negroni. At cultural level, "bitter" can describe an attitude. At advertising level, it connects contemporary activity with a historical Campari execution from the 1970s.
The strategy becomes more defensible because Campari also has a unusually strong link with the cocktail being promoted. The standard Negroni combines equal measures of Campari, sweet vermouth and gin, and the International Bartenders Association specifies Campari in its official recipe. Campari also cites Drinks International's 2025 cocktail research, which ranked the Negroni as the best-selling classic cocktail among the world's leading bars surveyed.
For marketers, this is materially different from a spirits brand sponsoring a generic nightlife occasion.
Campari can build the category and build the trademark simultaneously. Each time a bartender or consumer learns the canonical Negroni recipe, Campari has an opportunity to reinforce itself as an ingredient rather than merely one optional brand fighting for the pour.
That is a valuable form of category ownership. The brand does not need the Negroni to become proprietary in a legal sense. It needs consumers to mentally connect the cocktail, the red colour and the bitter taste with Campari strongly enough that ordering a Negroni increases the likelihood of ordering Campari.
The decision to revive old advertising also shows why brand archives can be more valuable than they appear on the balance sheet. A historical idea such as "9 out of 10,000" already contains scarcity, differentiation, product truth and attitude. Campari's task is therefore reinterpretation rather than invention.
For established spirits businesses sitting on decades of creative work, the question is worth asking: which old campaigns contain an enduring product truth that could be rebuilt for today's media environment?
Campari's advantage also comes from the scale and longevity of Negroni Week itself.
Imbibe launched the initiative in 2013 with roughly 120 participating venues. It has since expanded to thousands of venues internationally and has raised more than US$5 million for charitable organisations over its lifetime. The 2026 edition runs from 21 to 27 September.
The previous year's numbers illustrate how large the platform has become. More than 15,000 bars and restaurants across 97 countries participated in Negroni Week 2025, raising more than US$700,000, according to Campari and Slow Food.
Slow Food has served as Negroni Week's official giving partner since 2022. For 2026, money from the Slow Food Negroni Week Fund is being directed towards education scholarships, Innovation Awards, exchanges and grants connected with the hospitality and food-and-beverage community.
This structure gives Campari something conventional media cannot easily reproduce: an annual moment in which consumers, bartenders, bars, restaurants, media, a charitable partner and the brand can all have a reason to participate.
It effectively creates a recurring commercial and cultural calendar property.
That distinction is important for C-suite marketers evaluating sponsorships. Buying visibility around someone else's major event can deliver reach, but the brand normally relinquishes much of the intellectual and commercial equity when the event ends. A repeatable platform closely associated with the brand's signature serve can compound over time.
Negroni Week also allows global consistency without requiring identical local execution. One market can organise bartender programmes, another can concentrate on participating accounts, another on consumer events, and another on social content. The underlying memory structure remains uncomplicated: Negroni, Campari, September.
For a global spirits company, that is a useful balance between central brand governance and local market activation.
There is also a trade-marketing benefit. Bars are not merely media locations in this model. Participating venues register, donate to Slow Food and feature classic Negronis or variations during the week.
That turns the on-trade into an active participant rather than the last link in the campaign's distribution chain.
Campari's 2026 programme is not relying exclusively on fame and earned attention.
In selected US markets, consumers ordering a Campari Negroni can submit a receipt and receive up to US$15 back, subject to local availability.
It may look like a relatively simple promotional device, but strategically it closes an important gap.
The Bitter Nine can create attention. Alan Cumming can generate press and social visibility. Negroni Week creates an occasion. Participating bars provide physical availability. The rebate then supplies a reason for a consumer to convert that attention into a purchase.
That produces a much more complete commercial architecture:
distinctive brand idea -> cultural talent -> earned and social reach -> on-premise availability -> purchase incentive -> transaction data
Public materials reviewed for the campaign do not disclose Campari's overall media investment, the expected number of rebate redemptions, sales-lift targets or the commercial arrangements with members of The Bitter Nine. Consequently, it would be misleading to attach a speculative ROI figure to the programme.
But the measurement opportunity is stronger than it would be for a celebrity campaign based only on impressions.
A serious post-campaign assessment should separate brand effects from commercial effects. Brand measures could include prompted and unprompted association between Campari and the Negroni, branded search, social conversation and recognition of "Stay Bitter". Commercial measures should include participating-account velocity, incremental Negroni orders, rebate claims, cost per redeemed offer, new-to-brand penetration where measurable, and sales retention after the promotional week.
The most revealing metric may actually come later. If accounts that activate during Negroni Week continue listing Campari-led Negronis and related serves for several months, the campaign has created a more durable return than a one-week sales spike.
That matters in beverage alcohol, where the on-trade influences not only immediate consumption but cocktail repertoire, bartender recommendation and subsequent at-home purchasing.
The timing makes the campaign more strategically important than a seasonal marketing story might suggest.
Campari Group's aperitif portfolio is central to the economics of the business. In the first half of 2026, its House of Aperitifs represented 49% of group sales and delivered 4.0% organic growth. Within that portfolio, the Campari brand grew 2.3% organically, while Aperol increased 3.3% and the group's other aperitif brands grew 8.8%.
Campari Group was also spending heavily behind its brands. Advertising and promotion represented 17.4% of sales in the first half of 2026, according to the company's interim presentation, with management describing continued brand-building investment around peak seasons and innovation.
So Negroni Week is not operating at the edge of the portfolio. It supports one of the group's largest strategic engines.
And competition around aperitif occasions is increasing.
Reuters reported in July that global spritz consumption had risen from about 2.5 billion servings in 2019 to nearly 4 billion in 2024, while Campari was taking additional steps to protect Aperol from lower-priced imitators and rival aperitifs. The group has been broadening its defence across Aperol, Sarti, Crodino and other brands rather than depending on a single proposition.
The Hugo Spritz has added another competitive front. The Financial Times reported in August 2026 that US sales of Bacardi-owned St-Germain, the elderflower liqueur associated with the Hugo, had risen by about 40% over the preceding three months, while Aperol was down 4% over the same period. Aperol remained vastly larger globally, with 8.8 million cases sold in 2025 compared with 435,000 for St-Germain, but the figures demonstrate how quickly a new serve can capture attention.
Campari Group's response is increasingly portfolio-based.
Earlier in September, it launched Sarti in the US under the "Too Pink to Care" platform in what the company described as its largest-ever investment in introducing an aperitivo to a new market. The execution included oversized pink luggage installations and other highly visible activations, with Sarti joining Campari, Aperol and non-alcoholic Crodino in the group's US aperitivo offering.
From a portfolio strategy perspective, this creates an interesting division of labour.
Aperol can continue to occupy the accessible orange-spritz occasion. Sarti can seek attention through colour and irreverence. Crodino can participate in alcohol-free aperitivo occasions. Campari can lean harder into sophisticated bitterness and the Negroni.
The important point is not simply to own more aperitif brands. It is to give each brand a sufficiently distinctive reason to exist so that the portfolio expands the company's addressable occasions rather than forcing its own trademarks into unnecessary overlap.
That is why "Stay Bitter" has strategic value beyond this week's media coverage. It gives Campari a sharper role inside Campari Group's increasingly crowded aperitif house.
The first lesson is to turn product characteristics into communications assets. Campari is not hiding the fact that bitterness can be challenging. It is taking the challenging part of the liquid and making it central to the brand's cultural identity. That is harder for competitors to appropriate than generic territories such as friendship, celebration or craftsmanship because the message connects directly to what the consumer tastes.
The second is to build campaign platforms that can change execution without changing strategy. Sarah Michelle Gellar, merchandise, New York outdoor advertising and trade events defined the 2025 version of Stay Bitter. Alan Cumming, a nine-person creative group and cashback define much of 2026. The activation has evolved while the memory structure remains intact.
The third is to design talent around an idea rather than designing an idea around available talent. Cumming works because the campaign is interested in distinctive personality. The broader Bitter Nine gives Campari multiple cultural entry points while preventing the entire platform from becoming synonymous with one famous face.
The fourth is to connect fame with availability and conversion. Marketing effectiveness deteriorates when cultural attention, trade execution and sales activation are managed as separate programmes. Campari's approach puts the celebrity story, Negroni Week's participating venues and a consumer purchase incentive into the same window.
The fifth is to invest in recurring occasions. Negroni Week began with around 120 venues in 2013 and now reaches thousands worldwide, with more than US$5 million raised cumulatively for charitable causes. That scale was not generated by a single launch burst. It is the product of repetition.
Finally, there is a portfolio lesson. Campari Group is simultaneously investing behind Campari, Aperol, Sarti and other aperitif propositions at a time when the spritz and aperitivo market is attracting more competitors. The answer to that complexity cannot simply be more media. It requires clearer brand roles.
For Campari, "bitter" increasingly appears to be that role.
The cleverness of The Bitter Nine is therefore not that nine culturally interesting people have been placed around a famous cocktail. It is that a potentially polarising sensory characteristic, an advertising idea from the 1970s, a century-old cocktail, a global hospitality fundraiser, contemporary creative talent and a measurable purchase mechanic have all been made to reinforce the same piece of brand memory.
For alcohol marketers facing pressure to prove both long-term brand value and short-term commercial return, that integration is the part of the campaign worth studying.
.svg)
Industry intel in your inbox — from major headlines to expert insights, stay ahead in the business of alcohol.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
%20(1).png)