Urban distillery grand opening · Louisville, KY

$16K spend. $41K ticket revenue.

First urban distillery on the Bourbon Trail. Built a hyperlocal media plan from first principles — tied every ad dollar to admissions.

ExperienceBourbonHyperlocal
<$10 Ticket acquisition CPA ↓ often below $1 per ticket
ADWORDS REVENUE
$41K+
directly attributed
PRE-SALE DAY
$6K+
email/social on day one
REACH
200K+
people reached for <$2.5K
DIGITAL TICKETS
28%
of all distillery tickets
THE PLAYBOOK

How we built the hyperlocal launch playbook

Old Forester opened the first urban distillery on Louisville's Bourbon Trail — a rural-tour ecosystem with no urban-experience playbook and no distillery homeplace manager or PR lead in place yet.

We modeled max acceptable cost-per-ticket from first principles ($16 admission + 1-in-3 guests buying a $53 bottle + $13 merchandise = $47 max CPA). Pre-launch, we ran age-gated FB ads inviting consumers to sign up for ticket alerts — collecting hundreds of qualified emails before doors opened.

On launch week, deployed coordinated email + paid social + Google AdWords with branded and unbranded keyword targeting. Founded a cross-brand Homeplaces Comms Task Force that's still active across the Brown-Forman portfolio.

The pre-launch + launch system

  1. Modeled max-CPA from first principles: $16 admission + 33% bottle attach @ $53 + $13 merch = $47 ceiling.
  2. Pre-launch: age-gated FB lead capture for ticket alerts. Hundreds of qualified emails collected before doors opened.
  3. Wired Xola ticket attribution + B-F IT consumer-data protections end-to-end so every ticket was traceable.
  4. Launch week: Google AdWords on branded + unbranded queries optimized to sub-$10 CPA, often under $1.

What it produced

  1. $16K AdWords spend → $41,195 in directly-attributed ticket revenue. ~2.6x ROAS on a paid channel.
  2. $6,000+ generated on day-of-pre-sale from email + social efforts alone.
  3. 200,000+ people reached in 3 days for under $2,500 in spend.
  4. Approach shared with other B-F brands as the homeplace launch template.