How to fill the wine glass

Wines & Vines, Nov, 2002 by John Gillespie

March is frozen food month, so what better time to make the point that any meal--and I do mean any meal--is made better with wine. Our panel of wine and food experts sat down with the top frozen entrees sold in American supermarkets and put together wine pairings...and this exercise netted an incredible amount of editorial attention, all focused on the simple thought that "maybe wine really does go with anything you eat."

But my favorite headline resulting from this effort is the one from the Chicago Sun-Times which says it best: "wine all the time." Nice thought.

Onward to May, when we photographed burgers with wine in juice glasses, and offered tips for making wine more at home with the backyard barbecue.

Again, lots of pick-up by the press, including the King Features Syndicate, which offered the photo and story to their 5,000 newspaper affiliates.

These are but a few highlights from the campaign. There is much more--in fact a year-long calendar of programs, events and initiatives that keeps wine in the mainstream consumer media at a level our industry has never enjoyed in the past.

In the last 12 months, we went well beyond our goal of generating 50 million consumer impressions, and well over our goals in all media--TV print, radio, and Internet.

The fact is that our media campaign for wine continues now in its fifth year as perhaps the most successful and cost-effective program of its kind in the U.S.

Building on this success, we are now positioned to expand and refocus our efforts with the implementation this fall of a new campaign that deploys advertising, merchandising and grass roots tactics as well as the ongoing public relations and Internet initiatives.

Integrated Campaign

The result will be--at long last--a fully integrated campaign dedicated to establishing the widespread acceptance of wine as a familiar and rewarding part of American culture.

Wine had a minuscule share of the overall advertising spent in 2001, as usual, dwarfed by the nearly $1 billion and the nearly half billion dollars spent respectively by beer and spirits marketers.

From a brand point-of-view, however, wine's advertising spend is significant, since it is nearly all targeted very narrowly on core consumers--merely 10% of the adult population--and reaches them quite effectively in the highly selected media venues they rely on for information about wine and food.

From an industry standpoint, engaging in the "momentary, purchased-share-of-mind" game does not make sense, even with an annual spend of $20 million. And if the rate of spending alone brought commensurate consumer acceptance, then why are we not all drinking ice beer, or dry beer, or red beer or--even--new Coke?

The fact is that it is not necessary to spend heavily in order to stand out. The incredible success we've had in the mainstream consumer media through our public relations initiatives has proven that.

You can stand out--"break though the clutter" in the parlance of advertising--without a gargantuan media spend. This is as true in advertising as it is in public relations.