The Sport of Dancing Bull Wine

April 20 2007

As a young sales buck, I was quickly exposed to the, “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with b.s.” school of selling.

This was quickly followed up with a quick tutorial in “tap dancing” school of sales when responding to a question that doesn’t have a good answer, or the answer that’s correct at the time.

Fortunately, shortly thereafter I learned that b.s. and/or dancing doesn’t work. Rarely to does the ‘dazzle ‘em’ part work, either.

Educated as a journalist (before I get any snarky comments or email about my grammar and English, let me be the first to say that I essentially went 10 years writing nothing more than emails and birthday cards, btw), I quickly fell back on simply asking good questions. Asking the five “W” questions is second nature to me. Who, what, why, when, and where. By virtue of my journalism education, I had designs to go into the advertising world and work for a large agency—you know, crafting the next Nike ad campaign and combining my perceived acumen in strategy and creativity.

This experience, in addition to building the ability to ask questions, also gave me educational experience in developing campaigns for brands. No Nike here, however. In fact, one professor took particular pleasure in making his students work on goofy projects like Vienna Sausages—his rational was that getting fired up about any brand you work with is important, so he was going to start the process for us with a bang. I spent a glorious semester working on an advertising campaign for mini sausages in a gelatinous goo in a small can.

The interesting thing is that advertising doesn’t start with an idea, it starts with research. So, off we trekked to the library to review this tome of a book that gave us information on where Vienna sausages were primarily consumed (the Carolinas), by whom, household incomes, high points for consumption in the year, so on and so forth.

This information gives a person strategic information in order to do a project charter to drive strategy for the creative folks to use as a jumping off point.

Running parallel to this and the point of this post is the recent launch of radio advertising for Rancho Zabacho Dancing Bull wines.

I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami and Indianapolis over the course of the last two weeks and have heard the same radio ads for Dancing Bull wine on the local market sports talk radio station in each market. I don’t listen to radio that many hours, so if I’m getting hit in three different markets it must’ve been a big media buy.

I find this very interesting, curious almost. I’m wondering what research the folks at Gallo did that justified what can be assumed to be a national media buy.

It seems like the entire campaign is ill conceived—starting with the tag line.

Curiously, the tag line for the wine—definitively geared towards men is, “Dancing Bull takes wine seriously so you don’t have to.”

Consider for a moment:

1) The wine comes from the Gallo label Rancho Zabacho with “Dancing Bull” as the secondary portion of the brand—and it’s not immediately intuitive if you’re a wine layperson
2) There are no verbal cues in the ads that prompt the listener to look for any specific images associated with the label
3) Men, generally speaking, in most situations, wine included, act as if they know more about a given subject then they actually do making the simplification of wine a potential mis-step, especially to sports wonks that listen to talk radio thriving on knowledge in a particular subject
4) The tag line sounds like a re-worked version from a deodorant ad, “We fight odor and wetness, so you don’t have to.”
5) No mention whatsoever of the two varietals that make up the product lineup—Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc
6) If you search for “Dancing Bull Wine” on Google the first result takes you to the Rancho Zabacho site, creating potential confusion in brand integrity
7) There is *NO* mention on the web site related to sports fans or the radio advertising, so a radio listener can’t actually confirm that they might be at the right sight if they did happen to Google the wine.

I’m all for wine advertising to create more mindshare with non-core wine drinkers, but I think this attempt is too flawed to be successful for Gallo.

The questions I’m asking lead me to believe that Dancing Bull radio ads may well just be b.s or tap dancing, I can’t tell which and it doesn’t take a journalist to figure that out. Tune in to any sports talk radio station during drive time and tell me what you think.