Most compliance conversations happen at the end. The creative is made, someone from legal reads it, and a few words change.
Alcohol does not work that way. The Advertising Standards Authority's Alcohol Code reaches back past the creative, past the media plan, and into who is allowed to be in the campaign at all. By the time you are reviewing content, every decision that mattered has already been made.
The two requirements that decide everything
Creators must be at least 25, and must appear 25
Both tests apply. A person can be 26 and still appear younger than 25 on screen.
Treat that as a recruitment rule rather than a casting note. It eliminates the most common way customer campaigns are built.
Audiences must be age-gated to 18 plus
Or demonstrably 80% or more adult. That applies to the organic post and to any paid amplification behind it, and it has to be evidenced rather than assumed.
Why that rules out an open call
The standard way to recruit for a customer campaign is to put the brief to a community and take the people who fit. It is fast, it is self-selecting, and it produces enthusiasm.
It also cannot control who responds. An open call reaches whoever sees it, which means the campaign cannot demonstrate that the code was satisfied before the content was made.
So alcohol campaigns here use closed, matched recruitment: participants are selected from the community against the code before they are approached. It is slower. It is the only version that can be defended.
What else the code shapes
Beyond who and to whom, the code governs what the content can suggest. Alcohol advertising must not imply that drinking contributes to social, sexual, sporting or personal success, must not associate alcohol with the operation of vehicles or machinery, and must not encourage excessive consumption.
The practical effect on a customer campaign is that the brief has to be built around an occasion rather than an outcome. What is on the table, who is there, what is being cooked. Not what the drink did for anybody's evening.
The retail structure changes the brief too
New Zealand supermarket alcohol licences cover beer and wine only. So a beer or wine brief can be built around the weekly shop at New World, PAK'nSAVE or Woolworths, and a spirits brief cannot. It has to run through Liquorland or an independent liquor retailer, which changes the recruitment filter and the purchase step.
Worth settling on day one rather than discovering when the first receipts come back.
The campaign this is drawn from
In a South Africa campaign, Heineken's Sol had distribution and no momentum. Real customers put Sol into their own summer occasions and posted the result. The archived case study reports delivered media value of 3.15 times the campaign investment over four days.
The insight transfers to New Zealand completely. Nobody chooses a beer from an advertisement, they choose it because it was in the chilly bin at a barbecue.
Almost nothing else transfers unchanged. The imagery has to be New Zealand. The occasion is a barbecue rather than a braai, and the language, the food and the setting are all different enough that a Kiwi audience would notice immediately. And the recruitment has to be rebuilt around the Alcohol Code from the first day.
The seasonal note
Both countries are in the southern hemisphere, so summer, Black Friday, Christmas and Easter all line up. That is the main reason the South African library is worth adapting at all.
Back-to-school timing needs a local check. In 2026, South African public-school learners returned on 14 January, while New Zealand state and state-integrated schools could start between 26 January and 9 February. For an alcohol brand, that gap changes the shape of January, when summer occasions and school-holiday schedules shape the brief.
A working order for an alcohol brief
- Check the brief against the Alcohol Code before anything else, including the creative idea.
- Decide the retail route, because beer and wine and spirits are bought in different places here.
- Recruit closed and matched, with the 25 and over requirement applied at selection.
- Build the audience gating into the publishing plan, organic and paid.
- Then, and only then, brief the occasion.
Run in that order it is a straightforward campaign. Run in the usual order it is an expensive re-shoot.
The disclosure rules that sit on top of all of this are in how to disclose paid creator content.