Everybody is all in on “ade.” We’ve talked about this. You know who else has talked about it? Constellation Brands’ chief executive Nick Fink. Earlier this week, he laid out the Modelo maker’s rationale for purchasing the booming pseudosegment’s No. 2 player, SpikedAde, to the crowd at Beer Marketer’s Insights’ fall conference. Per Brewbound’s dispatch from the show, Fink explained that:
The best innovations are the ones that take existing consumer trends and very simply come into commercial proposition.
Leave aside his overwrought abstraction of the subject at hand (that’s right, Nick, people do be putting vodka in sports drinks, very good!) and hone in on the second half of that sentence. The fuck sort of LinkedInglish is that? It’s straightforwardly true and totally unremarkable that developing products to match drinkers’ preferences is a good business practice. But if Fink were to just come right out and say that, rather than this undiagrammable gibberish, he wouldn’t have notched his third entry into the Buzzwords of The Week of 2026 pantheon. And in his rookie season, no less!
If you see beverage-alcohol corporatespeak in the wild that deserves to be the next Fingers Buzzword, submit it for consideration to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!
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