Can a YA heartthrob sell women beer? This ad is leaning on the female gaze.

The Summer I Turned Pretty is turning into the season beer companies started paying attention to women.

As fans of the Amazon Prime hit — which is ending after three seasons with Wednesday’s series finale — say goodbye to the show, Samuel Adams is cashing in on its popularity with a new campaign starring Conrad Fisher himself, Christopher Briney.

“Some things take time. You wait, you put in the work, and sometimes it actually pays off,” the actor says in one of the two ads, which sees him manning a grill and watering a garden before treating himself to an ice-cold beer. “Not everything’s worth the wait. But this is.”

Sure, that beer looks refreshing. But it’s the lingering shots of 27-year-old Briney — one-third of the Belly/Fisher Brothers love triangle and arguably the summer’s biggest heartthrob — that really have women thirsting.

“This is the best dopamine hit ever,” one woman wrote in response to the ad on Instagram. “My heart is swooning,” commented another. More viewers also gave a nod to the show’s title by writing, “The summer I started drinking Samuel Adams.”

And that, according to marketing experts, is the point.

Leaning into the female gaze

Think “beer commercial” and you might picture ads heavy on mountain vistas, bros (like the backward baseball cap-wearing one featured in Sam Adams’s “Your Cousin From Boston” campaign) and, as Ilana Glazer called out in her 2023 Miller Lite spot, sexy women.

But Sam Adams seems to have learned a thing or two from the success of TSITP and its focus on the female gaze. Intimate closeups of Briney-as-Conrad’s hands have helped establish him as, to quote GQ, the internet’s “black cat boyfriend.” That pining has fetched Briney comparisons to Leonardo DiCaprio — and brands are starting to pay attention.

Sam Adams is hoping that yearning for the YA object of affection will help sell beer. “They clearly saw the opportunity of unlocking the female market,” James Buonantuono, the head of creative at S50 advertising agency, tells Yahoo. “And advertising to women doesn't have to feel like advertising to women.”

It’s not that seeing Briney behind a grill is “so wildly different from other beer ads,” says Buonantuono, but it’s the subtle ways in which the actor blurs the line between himself and his character Conrad that let female audiences in particular know that this ad is for them. It’s also the reason they can’t look away.

Take Briney wearing trousers and a white T-shirt while watering hydrangeas, for example. That scene alone might not scream “sex appeal” to general audiences, but to those who have already been lusting over Conrad, who wore an identical outfit while wiping peach juice from onscreen love interest Belly’s face in a standout TSITP scene, the connection is clear.

“The hydrangea. The shirt. THE MAN,” one commenter gushed. “They knew what they were doing with this,” another fan wrote.

In another Sam Adams ad, Briney is seen doing chores, like fixing a TV and hanging up a framed photo, in a Canadian tuxedo. It’s reminiscent of Conrad hand-washing dishes in a blue button-down shirt with jeans — a TSITP scene that had people calling his character “unreasonably hot” and “so husband.” Some TikToks also call attention to Conrad’s hand movements (à la Mr. Darcy’s famous hand flex), so it’s no surprise that the Sam Adams commercial has him nicking his finger and licking the wound.

It’s all very intentional, according to Bri Ramos, founder and chief strategist of Buzz Brand. “It works because people are already obsessed with this character, so they aren’t seeing [Briney] as the actor, they’re seeing him as [Conrad],” she tells Yahoo. “Samuel Adams is tapping into an audience that already exists that they don't have access to, which is all the women who are obsessed with this show and this actor. And so you just already have that loyal follower base to connect with.”

And the domestic chores Briney is doing in the campaign suggest he’s nurturing, reliable and capable. It “addresses some of the things that women want,” says Ramos. “They’re showing him doing things that you wish your husband would do and putting it into this persona of him.”

Going after ‘purse power’

While TSITP and Sam Adams might not seem like an immediately obvious pairing, Ramos points to the YA series’s adult fandom, a demographic the beer company would want to target. Tapping into a cultural moment is also something worth chasing for any brand looking to expand its customer base.

“A huge part of marketing strategy is staying relevant and quickly responding to things, so you just have a leading edge when you play into pop culture,” she says. It’s something Panera Bread is also doing, Ramos notes. The café chain cast Briney in a TSITP-inspired commercial that riffed on the show’s love triangle.

Will the strategy result in better beer sales, or just the admiration of TSITP fans online? Either way, Ramos says the female consumer’s dollar is worth pursuing.

“We have purse power — 85% of the spending in our country is done by women,” says Ramos. “When my husband needs something, I run to the store and I go and I grab his beer or I order it, so whether [these women] are drinking the product or not, women are decision makers, they run their households, they manage their entire family.”

One commenter echoed that sentiment on Instagram: “I love how the general marketing community found out how powerful the female consumers are … no matter what the product.” Wrote another: “And suddenly I’m craving beer.”