Good Grape Wine Company

July 21 2008

The Dumbest Money Spent in the Wine Business

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. 

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