The Top Wine Marketers

Advertising Age has released its Marketing 50 Awards (PDF):

The marketers behind these products broke through the clutter and delivered real impact (and ROI) for their brands.

What's interesting (and kinda cool) is that two of the award winners are winery people:  Donny Sebastiani of Don Sebastiani & Sons and Hugh McLeod of Stormhoek.  Sebastiani is described as "uncorking the stodgy world of wine marketing" with innovative naming and packaging.  McLeod, of course, has used blogging and bloggers as a grassroots form of marketing (the writeup fails to mention the PR value of doing something unusual, which may have actually been the driving factor for Stormhoek).

Both wineries have non-standard Web sites as well.  DonAndSons.com is a high-gloss site that makes use of Flash and other (for the wine biz) cutting edge technologies like podcasting and video.  As you might expect, Stormhoek's Web site is a blog.

I'll stick my neck out and say that neither Web site is particularly visitor effective, at least as we define it at The Winery Web Site Report (for instance, the Stormhoek site displays oddly in Internet Explorer, and the Sebastiani site doesn't particularly help people who come to the site looking to buy wine).  Remember, winery Web site visitors come with a goal already in mind, and your site should make sure that it's obvious how to reach that goal.

Comments

[gamesgeeks]

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