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July 22 2008
I don’t want to sound like a reactionary alarmist here, but with the incessant chatter about global warming and California temperature increases leading to omnipresent style changes in wines, and potentially different plotting of varietals because AVA’s may may get too hot for for their prevailingly predominant varietals, etc. is anybody stopping to think about water?
Inspired by this prescient post from The Cork Board and an article today in the SF Chronicle.
July 21 2008
I am calling out the elephant in the room—the one behind the curtains that nobody wants to acknowledge exists; the fact that some really dumb money is spent in wine lifestyle magazine advertising.
At some point the consumer wine magazine sales representatives need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and decide when they are going to stop being bankrupt of integrity and start making good advertising and marketing recommendations to their International country trade association clients.
Flip through any wine and/or wine and food magazine – Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Wine News, Quarterly Review of Wines, Wine & Spirits, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Saveur, etc. and you run a pretty good chance of seeing an advertisement from an international wine trade commission.
You know the drill: Wines of Spain, Wines of Austria, Wines of Greece, and the list goes on and on …
“Try our country’s wines,” is the basic come-in. All of these ads are brand neutral and none of them are worth a damn. Completely anonymous and non-descript.
Sure, sure, the ad reps. for these magazines justify the business with CPMs and demographics, influence, and my favorite, “pass along readership.” However, the fact of the matter is, in this day and age, the advertising for a country and its wine region does absolutely zero, zilch, zip, nada.
If the advertising did matter, if it drove consumer interest, they would have a website that tracked to a source code from the magazine or a special landing page, because that is what marketers do: measure how they spend money for what result, usually a sales result. It seems so simple. Return on Investment.
Yet, these International association ads do none of that. Seemingly, the advertising sales reps. do not encourage the trade associations to track results because they would quickly realize how much result they were getting for $10’s of thousands of dollars in advertising spends.
Sure, the magazine people will say that they do the important work of creating mindshare within important contextual editorial, but let us be honest here: who reads magazines anymore? I do. However, I sometimes feel like I am the only one. Nobody under 30 reads magazines, especially not lifestyle luxury oriented food and drink magazines—the ones with the Range Rover ads. And, duh, I wonder who is buying the majority of imported wine these days? You betcha. It is people under 30.
Can you say disconnect?
Here is how it breaks down. Typically, these country trade associations are funded cooperatively by member wineries, or an agricultural department that receives some sort of support from the country of origin. Usually, they have a man (or woman) on the ground in the states who acts as a Market Manager, or something similar; the representative of the country’s wines in the US for various marketing purposes—many of these folks live in San Francisco doing the important work of coordinating tastings and following marketing practices circa 1992.
It is a color by numbers job and presumably, if you show some activity against the meager budget you were given, talk about the power of Parker and Wine Spectator and how you have placed a $20K ad in said Spectator, show up in the country for whom you are representing twice a year, give a slide deck with insights into the mystical US market place with some pilfered sales data from the Internet talking about the increase in wine consumption, discuss a need for increased budgets couched within the importance of your individual work and impact, then you live to see another year pass on without much of a hiccup.
It is all pretty ridiculous and it drives me crazy. I hate to be a chest thumper about the Internet and online wine communities, etc. because that smacks of homer-ism, and that is not my point. However, my overall point is that very rare is the time that you see a large consumer general branding campaign and they are usually only executed by brands like HP, Coke and companies with equity built up to the point that influence is their currency. Everybody else had better have a value proposition and call to action or its all wasted money.
So, shame on the countries for not demanding more from their US based representatives, shame on the US based representatives for not delivering more creative ways of marketing and double-shame on the magazine ad sales reps. that are doing the equivalent of putting people into homes they should not be buying.
The dumbest money spent in the wine business? Wine trade commission ads for countries. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
July 17 2008
The curse of the tangential thinker who looks at life through the prism of wine is that most everything sparks an idea, though not all of them are worth a darn.
I keep a notebook full of clipped articles, post ideas and other errata and I lose interest in many of these things before they ever fully germinate. I’ve been trying to find a connection between German Mittelstand businesses and boutique vintners for two years and have never really tied the ends close enough together to make it interesting enough to write, let alone read. And, I’ve been trying to find a wine tie-in so I can call a post something along the lines of, “The Cultural Balkanization of Technology in Wine.”
Likewise, I have many ideas that must not be that clever because I see them elsewhere; or, perhaps, I am operating on the same channel wavelength as others. Tom from Fermentation is particularly good at beating me to the punch. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he wrote about wine and Van Morrison a month or two back.
Speaking of Tom, I read an article in the current issue of Wine News magazine titled, “Legendary California Vineyards.” And, Tom, in a recent post noted that he had been thinking about legacy vineyards being national monuments. Likewise, I have been thinking about the same thing. Baseball has Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field. Football has Lambeau Field and Notre Dame Stadium. Basketball has Cameron Indoor Arena and Madison Square Garden.
The angle I would have taken if I were going to write a full post is that our lives get more complicated. We strive to un-complicate our lives, but mostly, in doing so, we actually do the reverse of what we are trying to accomplish—make our lives more complicated. A scant 20 years ago we did not have the Internet, Starbucks, or even a dizzying array of chain restaurants to choose from. So, in the wine world, because our wine is going to become more complicated before it gets less complicated, what is the area that will increase in complexity? In my opinion, it is vineyard designate marketing. It seems to me that in the future more wine and lower price points will be a vineyard designate and an increasing amount of marketing dollars will be used to highlight how special the vines, grapes and dirt are.
Part and parcel with that, I imagine that vineyards like To Kalon will grow in mystifying legend.
Herewith, a couple of things that have been kicking around my brain that don’t/won’t merit a full post:
• There is a really big idea in this article about a consumer “Blue” movement and wine can play a leading role. I am nervous that the idea is not going to gather enough momentum, though.
o Link here
o Link here
• I have been reading a book called, “He Said Beer, She Said Wine” and it is a light-hearted and enjoyable read with the two co-authors presenting wine and beer food matches and then arguing their case for their respective beverage of choice as the best match to the food category. So, my thinking has been … wine as a food match has been conventional wisdom for centuries, but what if our conventional wisdom was currently backwards? What if beer was the accepted fait accompli match for food? It is kind of a silly question, but interesting if you bring the subject up in the midst of the 2nd bottle of wine.
• The non-California winery that creates a GPS plug-in with points of interest in their region (and their winery), is on their way to a marketing coup. To see an example of this, check out roadfood.com
• I am afraid of failing. Even though I say I am not, I am deathly afraid of not conquering a goal. It does not stop me, but it keeps the edge of my knife sharp, so to speak. That said, I am taking the introductory course for the Master Sommelier exam in September. I should pass with flying colors, but what if I don’t?
• A belated R.I.P. to George Carlin—here is a quote that many wine lovers can relate to: “Scratch any cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”
July 16 2008
I do not hate Gary Vaynerchuk, in fact, I like him, or at least I like the brand that is “Gary.” I have, however, officially crossed over the transom from being curious observer and analyst to being envious. What Gary Vaynerchuk has done in the span of two years, as an emerging pop culture icon, catapulting from an Internet-based video blog, is nothing short of astounding.
I have my brother to thank for this move into the envious camp, too. My brother does have a blog, but is not a wine drinker, does not follow wine and is 180 degrees different from me in terms of his interest level in wine—that is to say, a beer will do him just fine. But, he had the naïve chutzpah to send me a link to a recent article on Vaynerchuk from CNN.com or something similar, without knowing that I am well in tune with Winelibrary.tv, with the message of, “Hey, you need to do what this dude is doing.”
Ah, if it were only that simple.
It is one thing to build up a profile within the corridors of the wine industry, an area of business that, let us face it, is not rich with dynamism, but it is an entirely different thing to create a rip current in pop culture, which Gary is doing.
In addition, he is ubiquitous. I am minding my own business at work when I get an email from marketingprofs.com, a resource for interactive marketers, letting me know that Vaynerchuk is co-headlining a seminar with Arianna Huffington in October. His keynote title? “Uncorking your Brand with Social Media.”
Do I hate Gary Vaynerchuk? No. However, I wish like hell my charisma dial turned past 6.
Hate is a strong word and one that my mother admonished me for using. I was not allowed to use it. However, one thing I can tell you I have strong displeasure for is a certain wine retail shop in Indianapolis. I have written about them several times in the past in somewhat opaque terms. Said shop is on Keystone Avenue in an aluminum shed, if anybody knows Indianapolis, but my point is that I do not care for how they do business, I do not care for their warehouse like store and I do not care for the interactions I have had with the owner. Nonetheless, I get the monthly newsletters, and other communications just to torture myself. But, I am stopping that, too. I cannot take a wine shop, perhaps the biggest in Indianapolis, written by the owner, using the word “pallet” in a wine newsletter. Dude, it is spelled p-a-l-a-t-e. Then again, he is probably more in tune with the word pallet, because he buys the closeout swill by the pallet from the distributors and pimps it to unsuspecting customers.
Completely separate topic, in the event that you are not a member of the Wine Business Network on LinkedIN, I would encourage you to do so. I am the administrator and there are well over 700 people and growing by 20 – 25 people daily. You can join by hitting this link.
A little bit of shameless promo, but if you would like to display a pretty slick Good Grape widget on your own blog, you can do so, by hitting this link. I am giving a couple of wine books to each individual that uses the widget. If you put on your blog, send me a note and I will send you an in-kind gift.
Other things that have been in the stream of consciousness lately.
• I am stupefied that the Parker v. Broadbent tasting in London last week did not get more state side notice, before or after. If Parker and Hugh Johnson do the same thing, sign me up for the pay-per-view
• I am stupefied that the Harvard research and recent Wall Street Journal article that said the Longtail theory might be bunk has not gotten more notice. If true, a lot of small wineries betting on the Internet as a main sales channel are going to be up a creek
• There is a good article on Randall Grahm and Bonny Doon in the July issue of Inc. magazine. A lot could be said about his decision to sell-off brand assets and re-trench, but the one thing that cannot be said is he does not have an iron stomach. He is pulling our leg, though, when he is quoted as saying, “I have to rebrand Bonny Doon to be not about me but about the wines, and for most Americans, it’s a lot easier for th wines to be about a person or a story than about the wines themselves. We’re an immature wine culture. It will be a trick to do it.” He’s right about one thing—it will be a trick, of Houdini proportions. If he doesn’t brand by story and he doesn’t turn into a score whore, I’m not sure how he plans on selling his wine.
• I cannot tell if Hugh from gapingvoid.com (who has frequent forays into wine marketing commentary) is a boy genius or a hack selling the simple. I think it is both and kudos to him for not allowing me to tell a clear difference.
• I think the biggest opportunity in the online wine space is with CellarTracker. I do not know why, but it just feels like an opportunity. Maybe VinCellar from Vinfolio can be lumped in there, but it is all about the users and the user interace is important, but does not mean a thing if people are already familiar with it. The cost to move to a new place for your tasting notes is high, as well.
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