If you’ve ever stood in the ammo aisle before a hunt wondering whether you grabbed the right box for elk versus whitetail, Winchester wants to sort that out for you on YouTube.
Winchester Ammunition has launched a seven-part video series called Big Game Ammo 101, aimed at hunters trying to match the right load to the right animal. The first episode, “The Complete Lineup Tested,” is live now on the Winchester Ammunition YouTube channel, with six more installments to follow.
What the Series Covers
The series walks through Winchester’s big-game lineup — Deer Season XP, Copper Impact, Expedition Big Game, Expedition Big Game Long Range, and the Power-Point family — and puts them through accuracy, terminal performance, and ballistics testing.
Each episode covers what actually matters when you’re picking a hunting load: bullet construction, expansion behavior, weight retention, and how a given round performs at real hunting distances rather than at the marketing team’s preferred yardage.
Why Ammo Selection Actually Matters
This is a topic worth spending time on. Bullet technology has come a long way, and not every projectile behaves the same on a whitetail as it does on a bull elk. A 150-grain load that penetrates cleanly and expands reliably on a 150-pound deer at 200 yards can fail badly on 700 pounds of elk shoulder at 350.
Bonded and monolithic-copper designs like Winchester’s Copper Impact and the AccuBond in Expedition Big Game Long Range are built to hold together on heavy game and drive deep; softer cup-and-core designs like Deer Season XP dump their energy fast and are engineered for lighter-boned animals.
Understanding which is which — and matching the projectile to the game, the shot distance, and the barrel twist — is the difference between a clean harvest and a long, ugly tracking job. TTAG has walked through the current crop of deer loads in prior coverage; Winchester’s series looks to fill the same gap for hunters chasing bigger animals.
Winchester’s Take
Jason Gilbertson, Senior Director of Marketing for Winchester Ammunition, framed the series around confidence at the counter.
“Whether you’re after elk, deer, or other big game, this series is designed to help hunters choose the right ammo with confidence,” Gilbertson said. “Ammunition is a critical piece of gear on any hunt. It’s important to understand how bullet technologies differ and can be applied on various big game species. This is an in-depth series that cuts to what matters most when selecting ammunition.”
He’s not wrong about ammo being critical gear. You can spend a fortune on a rifle and glass and still blow it with the wrong load.
One Thing Worth Noting
The timing on this launch isn’t nothing. YouTube tightened its branded-content policies in September 2026 to bar sponsorship arrangements between firearms brands and independent creators — squeezing the guntube sponsorship model that’s driven a huge share of hunting-content discoverability in the last decade.
Manufacturer-owned channels aren’t hit by those restrictions. Expect more of this: first-party brand video, produced in-house, distributed through a manufacturer’s own YouTube presence, doing the work that independent guntubers used to do on sponsorship deals. Winchester is one of the biggest ammunition brands in the country and has the marketing budget to do it well. Smaller brands without that infrastructure will feel the YouTube policy shift a lot harder.
You can watch the first episode now on the Winchester Ammunition YouTube channel and learn more about the lineup at Winchester.com.
