Can the iPad save Stellenbosch?
Wednesday, 21 July, 2010
Neil Pendock
Neil Pendock ponders the future of wine marketing and sees hope on the
horizon.
Tyler Brûlé is Fast Lane columnist for the Weekend Financial Times and a man with a carefully manicured finger on the pulse of future fashion. TB is editor-in-chief of Monocle, a Next Level magazine that is almost architectural in its edgy design. He was also founder of Wallpaper* magazine that was doing fine until Johann Rupert pulled his Richemont ads after Afrikaans was described as "the ugliest language in the world" back in 2005; confirming the importance of advertisers to publishers.
Fast Lane recently reported on what the northern hemisphere is reading this summer. But rather than a list of airport potboilers and political memoirs, the whole column was taken up with how the playgrounds of the rich and famous are being disturbed by people with iPads; iPadders "determined to show everyone else that a) they're at the forefront of modern technology; b) they're super-duper connected and everyone else around them are fire-fearing cave-folk and c) they look like complete twits."
Confirming that these are dark days indeed for dead-tree media. Since 2007, US newspaper and magazine circulations have fallen by a third. The Spectator reports that last year 293 American newspapers and 1120 magazines folded. In the UK, largest market for SA wine exports, newspaper sales are down a quarter over three years. So the writing is clearly on the wall for wine marketing in print.
The Times loses R19 million a week while the Guardian and Observer double that at R38 million - a clearly unsustainable situation. The Speccie quotes a Financial Times executive as suggesting "the FT will be out of the pink newspaper business in five [years]." That organ's wine pundit, Jancis Robinson, has already smelt the coffee and offers her own Purple Pages. But the pricey subscription cost and access to 45 000 tasting notes (many presumably of only historical interest) would appeal to only the most serious of anoraks with deep pockets.
So how is a producer like tweebuffelsmeteenkoeëlmorsdoodgeskietfontein supposed to market her late harvest Pinotage in the buiteland? Digital is really the only game left in Dodge as 80% of dead-tree costs are for things like paper, ink and distribution of which digital requires none. Michael Olivier was first out of the local blocks with his Crush! e-zine launched earlier this month and once the glitch in the undersea cable off Kenya is fixed and his pages refresh like greased lightning, it will be a handy addition to the winespeak offering.
But the real challenge is to monetize content. With so many homegrown wannabe Jancis's and Robert Parker's out there, where is the money to be made? Take Christian Eedes and his whatidranklastnight blog for example. It used to require payment of R26.95 for a monthly dose of Christian's musings in the pages of WINE magazine. A much better quality offering, at almost daily frequency, has recently become available online, gratis.
While the denizens of dead-tree media watch to see whether Rupert Murdoch's £2 a week paywall erected around the Times and Sunday Times websites works (initial results indicate a 66% collapse of traffic, which is better than predicted) the threat for lifestyle content lies in the altruism of practitioners. As internet guru Clay Shirkey explains in Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin, 2010) "the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation."
The problem for those Christians wishing to make a living out of winespeak, is that those who know, are eager to impart their knowledge for free, and as any retailer knows, nothing beats free. Clay notes "People are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia - for no financial reward - because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness."
So how long before an SA Wine Wikipedia pops up, with wine lovers freely contributing their tasting notes and anecdotes towards a shared resource? While content may indeed be free, the hosting and management of such a resource will cost money. Some producers would argue that this is in the kind of activity that they already pay WOSA to resource while others, perhaps the larger ones, would want to steer their ad-spend towards those content providers they perceive as adding value to their brands.
Whatever the final model, it's unlikely that a wine paywall would succeed as consumers can already access as much winespeak as they can stomach, for free. So standby for a scramble to attract digital advertisements, a process which will raise many challenges for those subscribing to an independent point of view.