Imagine sitting down with your family to relax and watch a new series on Netflix. What you might not realise is that a beer company could be part of the script. After a new deal between Ambev and Netflix, alcohol brands may soon appear inside the stories themselves – not as ads, but as part of the scene. Brazil’s largest brewer, and the local subsidiary of global giant AB InBev, is now using streaming entertainment to promote its products in a way that might be impossible to recognise as marketing.
By building its beer brands into series and digital productions, Ambev is turning cultural content into a sales tool. The company calls it “connecting with audiences through culture.” In practice, it means beer quietly placed on tables, in hands, and in storylines – normalising alcohol use while avoiding the scrutiny applied to traditional advertising.
Declining sales and shifting habits
Ambev’s financial reports show why this new strategy was developed by the company. In the first half of 2025, beer sales in Brazil fell by nearly 9 percent, continuing a sharp decline that began the year before. Globally, AB InBev’s sales volumes also fell, with Brazil among its weakest markets. Once dominant across the domestic beer market, Ambev is now losing ground to Heineken and a growing number of smaller breweries.
The shift goes deeper than competition. Younger Brazilians are changing their habits. Surveys show that Gen Z consumers are drinking less, are more health-conscious, and increasingly prefer alcohol-free options and “experiences over intoxication.” For a company dependent on high-volume beer sales, this represents a direct threat to its core business. Integrating alcohol brands into Netflix series is an attempt to maintain visibility and keep beer ever-present in everyday culture.
The global partnership
The Brazilian strategy is part of a wider corporate shift. In September 2025, AB InBev announced a global partnership with Netflix that grants the brewer access to “title integrations,” co-branded campaigns, and advertising around live events. The deal was described by marketing analysts as “a strategic blending of content, commerce, and culture,” giving AB InBev’s brands new visibility inside the world’s largest streaming platform.
Both companies describe the collaboration as “unprecedented” in scope. AB InBev says it allows its brands to “live within culture” – language that reveals the company’s intent to blur the boundary between entertainment and marketing. Brazil, with its permissive regulatory environment and strong Ambev presence, is one of the first markets where the model is being tested.
Regulatory gaps and wider risks
Brazil’s advertising rules mainly target television and print, leaving streaming platforms largely outside regulatory control. By embedding alcohol in scripted content, Ambev can influence audiences without any visible signs of advertising or the health warnings that would normally be required.
Alcohol Industry tactics like these make alcohol promotion harder to detect and easier to absorb, particularly among younger viewers. Brazil already faces high levels of alcohol-related disease, violence, and road deaths. Presenting alcohol as an effortless part of leisure and storytelling risks deepening those harms while undermining prevention efforts.
Promotion, or any marketing strategies, is Big Alcohol’s activity to drive alcohol availability and acceptability, to perpetuate the alcohol norm, and to place alcohol at the center of people’s thoughts and preferences, communities’ practices, and societies’ customs. The focus of this Dubious Five strategy is the people and their beliefs about alcohol products, the public and their attitudes about and behavior around alcohol products, and the consumers and how much, how often they buy and consume alcohol brands.
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Capitalist.com.br – Ambev se junta à Netflix e aposta em séries para fazer você beber mais cerveja