On the House

Give em what you got, or...

...building strategic partnerships, giving tickets away and getting a great Google score.

My goal for the third annual Portland Indie Wine Festival was not to dip into my savings - again. Which meant, I was absolutely determined to keep our marketing budget to a minimum but to try to recover some of the costs associated with producing and promoting the event.

Our concept with the event is to attract the best artisanal winemakers in Oregon - those making 2,000 or fewer cases in the current vintage - and show off their quality, limited production wines in a series of events every May that connect to the trade and public. We aim to preserve and sustain the art of natural, craft winemaking and see Oregon as the promised land.

It's an ambitious program considering it's a hundred percent volunteer at the moment but in any case, the core group who run the event - the judges, the winemakers, the advisory counsel all feel strongly enough to give their time and energy to make it happen. (I owe them, big time!)

Long story short. No budget. Big idea. How do we promote it?

Well, this year we decided to jump into the foray of interactive media and do zero traditional advertising. We took our measly $ 10,000 spent in 2006 and directed that toward a James Beard Dinner in NY - we brought the Festival to New York and media to the dinner. It was amazing.

But the most critical thing we did was to form strategic partnerships with high profile organizations who had highly trafficked websites. People like the Portland Oregon Visitors Association, Powell's.com, Southwest Airlines, Morrison Child and Family Services, etc.

The outcome?

We were able to reach 15 million people through partner links, websites, blogs and on-line media. Wine importers came from as far as Spain to discover these rising star winemakers and bring their wines to Europe.

We went from two consecutive years of loss to earning $ 27,000 which we can reinvest in the Festival.

Simple tactics to partnership on-line promotion:
1. Think about who might want to partner to make your event successful and their business sexy.
2. Talk to them about offering website content to freshen up their site.
3. Offer to do a back link to their site in return for linking to you.
4. Offer two comp tickets to your event as a contest prize for their promotional e-newsletter.
5. Ask for tracking and measurement from the partner on the success of their program. You might just learn, like we did, that in some cases, our festival was their most active promotion and one that most partners were eager to commit to again.

Next up....

The power of real time promotion: Inviting bloggers to participate in your event to build awareness.

Food AND Wine?

At the end of a long Pinot-centric weekend I stopped by Seghesio Winery for a quick tour and tasting to round out our Sonoma County wine weekend and discovered a lovely new program for experiencing their wines. They've recently introduced a tasting room upstairs for those who want to have a little food with their tasting.

It's a bump up of $ 10.00 extra bucks, taking you from 15 for a flight down stairs to $ 25.00 for this library wine/food combo. It's such a great idea to add some savory bites to round out the wine experience.

Rather than focusing on specialty contemporary dishes, the Italian tapas we were served emphasized traditional Seghesio family recipes and provided great mouthwatering nibbles with tomato sauce, grilled vegetables, savory shrimp and billowy pasta.

Food AND wine?

It seems so bloody obvious but it's the first time I have been invited to sit for a few minutes and enjoy wine at its source this way.

Homey, thoughtful, delicious and necessary, especially for these big, Italian varietals.Despite lots of finesse these wines were born to be enjoyed with food. Let's hope more wineries follow the pack and start making mama's meatballs.

Wine Competition Confession

Two weeks ago we had our third annual wine competition for the Portland Indie Wine Festival. We received 138 wines from Oregon’s cadre of limited-production wineries, had an A-list line up of judges and all went smoothly.

But -- since this is the golden age of confession -- I’ll get one off my chest. I have never had more compassion for a 750 ml bottle of fermented juice in my life.

Not because the wines weren’t good this year, in fact, I’d say the quality of the wines we tasted was twice as good (if that’s measurable) than the 04s we tasted through last year.

The wines this time weren’t as tight, the winemaking seems to be more and more transparent, and the courage to break out of the Pinot population and do interesting dessert wines, whites (including Chardonnay and Riesling) and blends from warmer climates in Southern Oregon left me feeling incredibly excited about all that’s happening here.

However, it was the level of brutality that struck me about the judging experience. We organize the tasting so each panel of four has different perspectives. One winemaker, one retailer, one sommelier and one critic. We love how this fuels analysis and discussion and helps temper biases.

But, as each flight got swirled, sipped and evaluated, I couldn’t but help want to champion each and every little guy that came up for scrutiny. I kept wanting to shout – these are not grand cru burgundies from the 90s, these are wines which have just been bottled, represent a challenging vintage (2005 has some classic Oregon Pinot characteristics but if you didn’t pick at the right time, good luck) and are for the most part made by folks who are doing this for the artistry not the commercial value of these wines. Sure, analyze away but keep it in context, people.

I know this presents a paradox.

I created the event in the format I did because I wanted to show off Oregon’s best emerging winemakers and in order to do that, we need judges so we can show quality wines not just all wines submitted.

And when you judge, you bring all that you know to the table and want to critically evaluate each wine for typicity. So, I know I can’t have it both ways. And maybe, it all boils down to semantics and how honest the judges were during the tasting.

But I left that day feeling like we had taken Rex Reed to a short film by a 5 year old and he wrote a scathing review. It just seemed harsh.

It made me want to put a cork in my tendency to be super picky about what I drink, and celebrate the guts it takes to put your self out there and try to make something drinkable, let alone memorable. Which, I guess when you think about it, is what the indie wine festival is all about.

A LuLu of an idea

Last Sunday, for the first time, when I asked about a wine on a restaurant wine list, a few minutes later the wine director opened up the bottle just for us to taste. 

It's such an incredibly simple idea and so potent in building loyalty and respect. 

Congrats Lulu!  You might be a fading rose in terms of your buzz but, boy, the staff gets kudos for the treatment we got last weekend.

I popped into LuLu in San Francisco last Sunday with my second cousin, Don, and his wife, Beth, for a late afternoon lunch. While the restaurant has a bit of a been there, done that air, it's the perfect complement to a morning at the SF Museum of Modern Art.

We were all planning to have wine with lunch so I picked up the list and was a little stunned that most of the wines were around $60-100. I turned to the Rhone section, still quite high I thought, but then noticed two selection from the southern Rhone that were $ 27.00.  Both productions were unfamiliar to us.

We asked to speak with the wine guy, and he admitted he had not tasted one of the lowered priced wines. The other one, he didn't think we'd enjoy. We settled up a pricier selection because it was a better year and from Perrin, which is a label I trust and enjoy. The $ 27.00 wines were both 03s.  Too big for what we wanted at lunch.

Once the wine was poured -- lovely layered spice and cigar box, great texture, so good with our lamb stew -- the wine guy walked over with another bottle of wine.  It was the $27 he hadn't tasted yet. He said he wanted to share it with us and that he was going to use it that afternoon for the staff tasting. Such a simple solution and so impressive. Great work wine guy (sorry, I didn't get your name.)

Premium

The other night I was cooking and caught a new Big Beer television commercial from the black and white tv in my kitchen. I was struck by how counter intuitive it seemed to have someone from a giant industrial brewer to be promoting the specialness and great complexity of taste in a beer category that is notoriously considered neutral in flavor.

It seemed so transparent to me. One of those me-too campaigns that might have cut through the beer advertising clutter 20 years ago. But today, with every beverage category that's hot or growing by double digits having a central value proposition about interesting stories, special ingredients, places and people, this commercial jumped out at me as if it were saying, "We blew it. We waited too long. We loved being the big beer boys and we now want into the premium party. Let us in!!"

And if they genuinely do commit to changing their formula, water source, volume of production, general methods, etc. to create full-flavored interesting beers or through acquisition continue to move their main brand from commodity to micro brew style, then I think eventually they'll have something legit to talk about. However, from my hyper-focused "show me the story" perspective, I just don't understand how anyone in this climate would agree to promote a beverage that didn't fall into the super-premium or ultra-premium category?

As an agency, we would never dream of taking on a client whose brand didn't already have the premium positioning. Despite coming to the table with deep pockets (which are certainly attractive) commodities will continue to quietly play a role in convenience stores, supermarkets, casual dining and other channels, but in order to be successfully promoted by publicists, brands need to be top shelf.