Friday night thoughts
posted by philip in Wine Industry
Its Friday night and very quiet in the office as the rest of the office has left (they were up most of the night moving the site to our shiny new servers - am hoping you can all see the difference when you use the site). I’m feeling reflective so thought I’d jot down some thoughts about trade groups and efficiency.
Yes, I love efficiency and Snooth’s in part founded on that principle: its more efficient for you, the use, to have a single port of call to research your wines, its more efficient for wineries to have one standard of data feed to support and for them to have one site to monitor the public sentiment on their products.
When Jeff Lefevere of Good Grape posted a call for the two most forward thinking wine industry trade groups to merge, I immediately said I thought it was a good idea. Most people disagreed with Jeff, and maybe I was supposed to as well, as I’m on the Advisory Board for the Wine 2.0 trade group and one of the two Admins for the Open Wine Consortium group for Wine Technology Companies (the other being the fantastically quirky Randy Hall of WineBiz radio, who was wearing his “Bobs Bitch” tshirt when I met him).
Having one industry group is simply the ‘efficient response’. It may be hard to actually create, or outside of the respective founders interests, but thats not for me to judge.
This brings me to my next cry for efficiency: wine bottle shots.
Every winery takes a beautiful and artistic photo of every wine they produce. They may have the bottle next to a full glass of their wine, or perhaps carefully positioned on a rustic picnic table, with a bunch of grapes on one side and some corks on the other. Its beautiful, romantic, evocative.
Unfortunately, this is not what online retailers want. They want standard bottle shots. White background, high resolution, standard lighting and standard angles so every bottle shot looks the same and gives the store a sense of uniformity. So every online store now has to hire a professional photographer to re-shoot every bottle of every wine they sell.
With around 25,000 wines sold in the USA each year and hundreds of stores in the US alone having to photograph every bottle they display online the inefficiency is galling.
Conservatively, consider this:
200 stores, each needing 2,000 wines photographed per year at a cost of $50 per bottle shot (and these numbers are very conservative). Thats $20 million.
If there was a standard and the wineries took a second bottle shot that adhered to the standard we’d save $19.9 million dollars.
Stores would be able to offer bigger discounts to the consumer, wineries (at a minimal cost) could ensure their brand was visually represented at its best at all times across all stores, and everyone would be happy.
Not only would this be a big help to retailers but it would really help out wine publishers as well. The bottle shot and easily findable label files… but I may just be dreaming.
I spend a lot of time cropping the bottles out of the scenic winery provided photos. Also, as a designer, it drives me a bit nuts when the lighting on the bottles varies — especially between bottles of the same vineyard. So yes indeed!
Interesting and heartening to hear support for this. I would like to see if there’s any opposition, but its clearly the efficient solution. Take iPod’s for example, its fairly clear that every online store selling the iPod doesnt need to re-photograph it, they just use apple’s stock images
Guys … definitely see a difference in performance and I don’t ‘lose’ my recommendations any more! Great job.
I got a few replies to this on an industry trade group site i’m a member of:
Ian Griffith of Beverage Media:
It would certainly make our lives easier if there was a standardized format for bottle shots. Ideally winery websites wouldn’t make the only shot of a wine available on a flash page or pdf file. Are you thinking about all wineries or only wineries of a particular size? And if you can crack this one I’d like to have a go with standardizing UPC codes.
Marshall Sontag of WineQ:
Count me out, my friend! We take our own photos and we (WineQ members included) love them!
It’s probably cheaper to hire a team of people to Photoshop every single wine brand you put on your site, than to try to get every obscure Chilean winery and small farmer with a wine to adopt a photographic standard, not to mention all the myriad Constellation, et al, brands.
I can’t argue with your logic, though.
Ian and Marshall - agreed it would be an epic project to get every single, far flung winery to adhere to a standard, but you dont need too many to agree on a standard for it to begin to work. I was speaking to Paul Mabray about this, with IBG and just a few other constituents a standard could be set and even if just 10% or so of wineries followed it it would be a big help, and over time more should follow.
UPC code standardization would be great as well, but I think thats even harder. The average winery simply copies a Gallo UPC or recycles the same one annually. I’m hoping that with bottle shots, being that they are more visible to the consumer we might get traction faster.
and Marshall, you’re right, the photos you take are fantastic, the benefit is mainly for stores with 2,000 sku’s and up (and sites like snooth of course).
This is a great topic. At Inertia we STRONGLY believe in helping data hygiene for products and have modeled our new system to accommodate exactly this issue. Every winery will have label shots and possibly bottle shots in a standardized format that will be available for consumption via web services. This will be available Sept 08 when we finish migrating all our current wineries onto the new platform. It is exactly akin to the consumer electronic goods industry that standardize their product descriptions and then promote them via rss, web services, or other methods. I am a HUGE believer in not only the label issue but all data associated with every individual product. Only by standardizing at the source, will we all benefit as an industry.
P
Excellent Paul. Label shots are of course used by the TTB when the wines are registered. Bottle shots are easier for the consumer to identify at a glance, even at the expense of detail.
All we need now is a wine bottle photographer to define some sort of standard and then we can slowly begin to put the word out there.
Paul, I have a few contacts I can pester, but if Inertia has someone in house, or that you use drop me a line and I’ll contact them to come up with the tech specs of the ideal bottle shot.
Egads.
The fact that I stumble on Philip’s post a month late should tell you exactly how many balls I’m juggling. That, and my “Bob’s Bitch” T-shirt is in the laundry.
In essence, I see this as related to every other problem in the online wine industry: lack of uniformity. It abounds, partly because of the scale of the problem (how many 100’s of wineries? 1000’s of brands? 10000’s of labels?) but also the personalities involved. There is still a very deeply held NIH (not invented here) mentality in the wine industry. Everyone thinks they are Moses leading their people to the Promised Land, and few want to play nice with others out of some sense of zero-sum competition. The largest players (Diageo, Constellation, Fosters) all have crews of people that can provide uniformity within their individual realms. But step outside that bubble, and it’s a bit like entering the mosh pit at a Pantera concert. (I hope I’m not dating myself too badly).
So, the issue remains. How to transform an entire industry’s attitude toward data and media. I expect we’ll be at this a while.
Very true Randy - however, over time most bands made their profile pages on mySpace and the average musician thinks they are about as non-conformist as it gets