Carson Leno Fallon. Now it's wine talks with Paul K. Hey, welcome to wine talks with Paul K. And we are in studio today about to have a conversation with defamed Jessica Kogan. Introductions in just a moment. Wine talks, of course, available on I heart radio, Pandora, Spotify, wherever you hang out for podcasting. Hey, have a listen to a conversation with Rudolph French Taytanger. Yes, the famed family Tay tanger. But he has his own brand called
Freijn Frere. Oh, see, see? Also in French, he has a french bloom, which is a dynamic brand of non alcoholic sparkling wine from the Champagne region. So I'll listen to that, as well as Vito Lafata. My first conversation with Vito Lafata in Temecula. He's a Sicilian from Long island. So I asked if I should be, uh, you know, worried as to how this conversation might go. But no. He decided to soiree into the
wine business in Temecula, which is a southern California wine town. It's a fabulous conversation on the philosophy and history of his family getting into wine. So listen to that, but not while we're here. We're here to catch up with an old friend, Jessica Gogan, who is the CEO of HSP Brands, as well as connect the dots digital marketing and an old friend. Welcome to the show. Thank you for
having me. It's good to see you. Good to see you again. Last time we saw each other, anyway, it was up in Napa Valley or Sonoma county for a conversation about digital marketing. And then we spoke a little bit after that, but you moved on from where you were at when we spoke connect the dots and found that fascinating. A woman owned digital agency that does exactly what. What exactly do we do? But first, I want to get into what we do.
I want to first talk about the last time I saw you, which was you had just sold your business, and so we're both in different places, and I want to know how you are doing, and I will tell you everything about connect the dots. Well, thanks for asking that we're happy on a number of fronts, a little bit of freedom. I don't have to worry about making sure the packages are out there. We have enough boxes, are the inners and saying that the newsletter get printed, is the website
working? Is the chat bar working? So that relief has been quite rewarding. However, the time still seems like it's not enough. Producing this podcast takes quite a lot of energy. We produce everything ourselves. I organize it myself and looking to change that. But, yeah, there's a certain amount of there's a certain amount of envy because I loved the mix.
But at the same time, I don't miss the stress. I think I told you earlier off camera, often at 05:00 during the week, I would go, oh, I take a deep breath, because I knew my staff was going home and the events of the day couldn't occur past that, just to catch up the next morning at 08:00 and start over again. So I don't miss that. But I do miss the sort of hustle and bustle of that. Of that industry. Right. I mean, you were shipping every day, right? Every day,
yeah. I mean, what was the biggest struggle for you, like, as now that you have left? And I mean, aside the missing, the hustle and bustle, but, like,
what was it that at the end of the. Day, you're just like, you know, frankly, if you were to listen in on a conversation with Sandra and I, and Sandra being the compliance officer, and we were shipping into 42 states and paying the taxes, and I think every businessman would say this, that it's the workforce, it's that it's the unknown part, the human part of our work, which you never know what's going to happen. And so we had a couple of disability suits against us. We had. We got
a, we got a bill from Louisiana. Can you imagine this? A year, almost a year after we sold, we got a bill from Louisiana for $13,000 in pastor taxes, which was wrong. But, you know, there's stress in, like, receiving that letter and then trying to solve the problem. But I think the human factor at the same time that we're very proud that we launched a lot of careers in our tenure. We got people on their feet. There was a lot of stress when it came to make sure your employees were
happy and moving the needle for them. Do you think that's a California thing? Well, I think there's a general issue with labor right now in the country, but yes, California does propagate its own issues. Look at the dollar 20 an hour minimum wage here.
I heard an interesting comment from somebody saying that though panera was excluded from this because they make fresh bread, which is a bizarre trigger, they've also realized that they're not paying that wage now, so they're probably going to lose employees to the McDonald's of the world that are paying the dollar 20.
Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. It's totally aside from what we're really going to talk about, but I want to talk about wage for a moment, which is my older daughter, who's in college, is also an EMT. And did you know that the starting hourly of an EMT is $18.50 an hour? Are you serious? $18. So 10% less than the average flipping burgers. Exactly. And these are people who go through some serious training at level one to save your life. That's amazing. Isn't that? That's a
problem. It's a real problem. And I just was shocked and stunned. That's what AMR, which is the largest ambulance response privately held company in the US, that's what they pay. And they could save a life, right? They could save a life at a moment's notice, and they. But, you know, if you're flipping a burger, I mean, that's. You know, I mean, it's just. It's. It's so hard to understand that when you are in your most desperate moment, that the service that is being provided to you
is you are paying people. You're not paying people like a living wage who have to get all these expensive certifications to save your life. It's just fascinating to me because with HSP, our omnichannel events company, we pay $25 an hour. And that was recently changed because of the gig economy reversal of what happened in California with the Gavin Newsom bill, which essentially forced Instacart Doordash, all of the gig economy businesses to convert their contract labor force to employees.
It just. It shows you that legislating a problem is not the solution. Like, it doesn't work that way. And anytime you do that, it creates a new problem, and you have to let the marketplace solve itself. And my opinion is in general, and I flipped burgers at a beach hut when I was going through high school. And in my first year in college, you know, that was the stepping stone. I got to work with people. I learned how to cook. I still use that training today from Mister Salentino. But
you wanted to get out. You're like, okay, I'm ready for something new. And that was, of course, not a career. You don't flip and fry french fries for a career. You use it to move on, like any sous chef or line chef or line cook would do in a fancy restaurant. They don't want to be a line cook. I'm with you. I mean, I always, you know, I have this debate often. You know, there's good regulation and then there's just ridiculous
regulation. And I think we can both agree, in the adult beverage industry, the regulation is just sometimes just beyond the pale of understanding and borders on just, you know, anti competitive, everything. Well, I wasn't for years, I wasn't allowed, I mean, literally wasn't allowed to go to the WSWA meeting, which for the listeners is the wholesale. Wholesale spirits and wines of America. I had to use a fake card, you know, to get in. Did you?
Did you? Yeah, I went to a couple of meetings and I had. And, you know, a couple of guys knew who I was and they're like, you know, no problem. But, you know, you literally, because the wholesales of America, the ones that keep the noose around these about the state legislatures, about alcohol that have controlled all this, all these years, and it was fascinating. I felt pretty proud of myself. You're not allowed to come. So I actually meant like I was doing something that was causing a problem.
Yeah, but I agree with you. We were at the prohibition museum in Savannah, Georgia a couple weeks ago, and I learned a few things. But one of the, one of the things that my friends didn't understand is that when you, during prohibition, you could drink, you just couldn't produce it commercially and you couldn't sell it commercially, but you could make all the wine at home you wanted to and have all the parties you wanted to. But the fact that now
there's 50 versions of prohibition is. And I. Do you really think there's a, there's a break, a chink in the wall for solving that problem? I do think over time it will be, because as you know, my area of expertise is digital. And we tend to think you and I tend to think of digital in the adult beverage industry just as direct to consumer. And that is how the wholesalers of America have tried to
box DTC in. It's just that dragon is so much bigger now, especially since COVID consumers in this country, they engage with information digitally. And that change in behavior is absolutely going to eventually change the dynamics of how distribution wholesale work in general. And it's not just the supplier shipping direct to consumer. It's way bigger than that. It's just way bigger than that. In my mind,
it seems. I made this note, since you are on the tech side of this, you probably don't know this, but I did own a software company for years. In the early days of database in cold fusion. No, Oracle, unfortunately, it was not that big. But, you know, we were on the streets all over the country selling software. And it always seems like, particularly back then, that the industry was always in its infancy. In other words, there was something on the
horizon that was going to make what you're doing obsolete. And that has just accelerated even faster. In other words, what you do today is not going to work tomorrow, and so on and so on. But I think with the advent of digital marketing, AI on the rest of it, that's going to happen even faster. And to keep up and try to understand is I don't know what the solution is. I've been working on AI right myself
because I know that it's going to support what I'm doing. And I've been listening to all the seminars and all the onboarding seminars I can go to to understand it better and how it affects us. But certainly in your side of the. World, Paul, you've been doing AI since you started direct to consumer. I mean, you've been getting data from, I mean, any information that you get digitally and that you analyze is some degree of AI,
whether it's manual or automated. You know, you are determining, you are determining information based on data. That's the same AI. What we're talking about today is supercomputing, right? Like is this super supercomputing piece, but you've been doing it for, you've been doing it for 20 years, AI. I suppose that's a viewpoint I could accept that. I mean, we, to a certain extent now, machine learning has helped a little bit, understand.
You know, take some of that, and I wonder what the threat of that is, really. You wonder what the, it knows too much of what you're trying to do or not do. But certainly from, like for instance, with the podcast, I take the podcast audio, I shove it into this AI system, and it produces these amazing articles, talking points, questions to ask. It digs into your history to find out what you've done and writes an article for me. Well, that's, I mean, that saves
me a lot of time and headache and produces more content. Okay, great. Now everybody can produce content even faster than they did before. So what does that, what does that mean to us as consumers? Are we going to receive that much more messaging because it's that much faster and we can produce it. We can put it up on LinkedIn or eBay, I mean, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or the next
platform. So I think that, so what you just brought up to me is it's like such an opportunity to actually build a startup, which is the consolidation of that information. So, yes, like everybody is playing with AI to the extent that it can write you articles, it can take information off spoken word and come up with better ways of saying something frozen and, or producing social media bytes that are really,
that help market your brand. But I think ultimately, just the volume of content and volume of information, it was already overwhelming for consumers. It is now triply overwhelming. And eventually we're just going to see ways in which that information is managed better to consumers. And those are called influencers right now. But I think it's just something much. Bigger than that has to be, because I can't. The influencer thing just befuddles me. I don't
get it. You know, I think influencers are something that work very well for that have worked well for, like, Gen Z. But I think as they, as they get older, I think that they will move away from that and see that influencers are a limitation and not don't really help them actually see the world. So I just think that everything right now is in flux. Everything is changing, like, more than it ever has. AI is really is an important factor in everything we're doing. But let's be honest,
digital is our future. Digital is where we are going to be. Does it mean that the in person chatting and talking and engaging is not going to. Oh, must be cold over there. It's freezing so much. So I'm going to go back early days of Facebook when Chris Brogan, who I think was one of the geniuses, Gary Vee, was just starting, and Chris Brogan wrote the book called Trust Agents, which was sort of the concept of what our job is digitally, which has never changed,
really. But one of the things back in those days was that Facebook at that time was really a social network. You didn't really leave Facebook if you're on Facebook to play with your friends and talk and chat, and everybody that was in your network got your message, you weren't going to leave and go buy something. That just wasn't the case. And that's far from the truth. Today. It's almost why you go to Facebook, besides because you don't get to hear from your friends anymore anyway, and you buy
stuff. And the numbers, I don't think the numbers have changed that much. And maybe it is a Gen Z thing, but the idea was 80% of the people that, that were engaging with ads were influenced by those ads enough to do something. In other words, they'd rather get a recommendation from their friend on Facebook or Instagram than to bother going and research their own purchasing requirements to see what they wanted. They would just take the influencers now what they call influencers
idea. And I think that's changing a little bit. I think you're right. This patch here is from my father's group. Called Les amis Devin, which was Les amis Devin. Yeah, right. It was a huge countrywide group, and my dad had a chapter at his wine shop. And you would dress to the nines, you would go to the meetings. Robert Mondavi would speak, Dan Balzer would speak, Dan Berger would speak. And I think that experiential part
of life is coming back. And I think it's because there's too many messages to solve. Yes, 100 million%. And first of all, that identity, that is so beautiful. Like, that patch is gorgeous. It is absolutely stunning. That is beautiful artwork. I mean, it's the gold thread. It's beautiful. But yes, this is the thing. We need human connection. We want human connection. The difference is that digital is how we are going to actually find our way offline, if that makes
any sense. In order for us to find community, we actually have to find the community online to get us to the offline. To the offline ramp. Let me a specific example. You are online, you are researching, like, where. Okay, you move to a new city, and you want to find a park to take your dog to. Right? You don't know where, like, where a great park is. Where do you find out where to take your dog? To a great park? Tell me where you would go. Phone book. Okay.
It used to be, Paul, that you would go next door to the neighbor and introduce yourself and say, hi, I just moved here. Do you. Does anybody in this neighborhood have dogs? Where do you take your dogs? Right? Or you'd ask the real estate person or whatever. But today, what people do when they are searching to find a way to, I call it the off ramp to the physical connection, they go online to find that information and the reality. That's
like a very simplistic example. Take that all the way to how do I wash my deck for the summer? How do I make my deck ready for the summer? Where does a person go? Do they call a friend? Do they text a friend? What are they most likely to do? That's a good question. They are most likely to open a search tool on their phone and search how do
I clean my deck? What happens in that moment, right, is they get the information, and then they find out, like, the subgroups of people who are experts in cleaning their decks, and then they find out at Home Depot, they can buy XYZ. And then they find out that there's a group in their neighborhood that's like, really into, like, celebrating, like, building and making decks. And that it is like. It is counterintuitive for people who have grown up
who are 50 and above, but 50 and below. This is how they make connections into the physical world. They go online. And so that is, to me, the big distinguishing factor of change. And so if we accept that that is the change and that to reach people, we have to be digitally minded to bring them to us physically. I think that's clearly right on. So here's one of the headwinds that I. In fact, your example's
amazing. Cause I was just at an auction and there's a lamp I want to purchase and think, and since this will air after Sandra, my wife can watch it. She'll not know I'm doing this. Sandra. But it needs to be cleaned. It's a very nice french piece. And I, I didn't even leave the building. And I googled how to clean crystal lamps. You know, crystal in general. It looked like somebody smoked in the house. It was, had a brown tint to it. So I
agree with that. But here's, here's what, here's the part that I juggle with and get confused with. And I used to drive me nuts as a marketeer. The top 20. The top 20 best microphones, the top 20 best deck cleaners, the top 20 cleaning for lamps, the top 20. That is. It's a ruse. That's affiliate marketing that people are paying for. And I used to run these sort of rants about the idea. And so I did it the other day. I don't know why I did this, but I. What's the top USB
microphone for podcasting. And it sent me this audio technica thing. I sent it back in an hour. I put it back on Amazon stream. It was so bad because when you click on that best top 20 and you look at the URL and it's a mile long, that's an affiliate based deal. They paid for that position, most likely, and are be getting commission, of course. So how do we get to the organic version of that response? How do we know that it's legit? That my friend really recommended that dog park.
So that's really an interesting question. And that's where I feel that there's a lot of innovation to be had and where a lot of change can be made. Right. I think everybody recognizes, whether they know it consciously or unconsciously, that at some level when you do search in your browser, that what's being displayed to you is not a from the heart recommendation. So it does require, you know, a
deeper level of engagement. I do believe that there's going to be applications out there that are going to build trust that are going to be like centers of excellence of information. But I will say, you know, do you remember Craigslist? Do you remember, like, do you remember. It's gone, really. Craigslist is still run. They're owned by eBay. But like, going back to that, that stage of going to a place where you are seeing information
that is posted by community. And so I think that there's, there's, we are right for a moment for disruption, for community driven applications. That doesn't mean that digital advertising is going to go, you know, pear shaped at all. It's absolutely there.
The point is, is that if we understand that shoppers, customers, people are going, their first point of engagement is going to be digital to find information, whether it's to find a microphone or find friends or date or buy a car, that it behooves brands. It behooves pretty much anybody who's interested in engaging with customers to offer more than an article or a recommendation, but an invitation, an invitation to come and engage
offline. And that's kind of my new, like, to me, that's the paradigm shift, which is everybody knows now how to find something, but they don't know how to connect to something and connecting. The most meaningful connections are ones that you can touch and see in front of you. You know, that's a really interesting thought, is clearly right down what we were just talking about, which is the Les Amis devant quite type events that used to go
on, but they went on back then. Cause you had no choice, I guess. Humans are humans. They need the interaction. You can't hole up on your computer and, and disengage yourself from society because that's not who we are as humans. Which means that all this messaging that we get is diluted more and more with the more AI, with the more content. Everything's getting diluted and I referenced back in
the day. If I sent, I can highlight them maybe only 15 years ago, ten, if I had a really good napa cab that I. That was a legitimate deal. That was a legitimate overrun, legitimate inventory stuck in the warehouse, not being able to be sold. And I put it out there for, let's say, 999. I had a reasonably high level of confidence. I would sell 10,000 bottles in one email for
a couple of reasons. One, every day they would open every email. Everybody got my emails because they were, they were, there wasn't any spam back then and it was a legit deal. If I sent that same exact offer today with my old company, maybe I would have sold 510 cases. Maybe because that's the email sites being diluted. The messaging I get on my phone is being harassed. I'm not competing against other wine companies anymore. I'm competing against Kim Kardashian and all the other
messaging I'm getting. Because you only get so much time. We as humans, we only have nanoseconds to decide what we're gonna do with that information and move on. And so I think that has to break somehow. It will. I think it just has to. Like, this is too much volume. I think Les Amis Devant is something that should be brought back. Anything that was something in the past that was about hosting events, engaging with people, think Tupperware
parties. I mean, there is a necessity now for this, and there is a. I mean, just look at travel. Just travel as an example. Record travel around this country. Record attendance to concerts, record attendance to sports events. There is a reason for it. The reason is there is a deep desire
to connect. And so I believe that while we all can't own the Oakland A's or the Giants or be Taylor Swift, it is that there is a larger message in my mind, which is, as we see these trends and we see people making these massive efforts, and at a huge expense, to get out and touch and talk, we, as brands that are digitally enabled, must find that connection with customers in the offline world. And they're listening to you online. They hear you. They just want you to.
To meet with them, to offer them an opportunity to connect offline. That's what I believe. You know, it's an interesting thought, because this company grew from 1984 to 2007. And in 2007, I stopped them because the acquisition cost got out of reach. But for those 23 years, the sole methodology, successful methodology, to acquire customers was a handshake at a show. And we did. So we weren't testing graphics or messaging online. We weren't testing the database of people we were
sending to. We weren't testing the AI, we weren't testing anything. We were testing the crowd that would show up at either a boat show or a gun show or a home improvement show, which was very successful, or the wine tasting pavilion at the La County Fair. A million and a half people walk through the last year in 1996, you know, I shouldn't say these dates, because I
sound like an old guy, but. I will tell you, this is so they're going back, and they're going back in record numbers, and they're finding out. Is that part of the collective? It is so part of the collective is understanding the intersection of digital and physical, right. And taking that information to an industry that really for thousands of years lived offline in many ways and connected. Part of adult beverage and wine in general is about the relationships you build in the physical world.
That moment that you have at the table where you're, you know, talking about family, eating a beautiful food, you know, eating some beautiful food and, and just having this like, very emotional moment. In many ways, um, it is very difficult to express that emotion digitally. It is impossible. I mean, it, it can be done in a didactic. Right, it can be done in
a video like all of your podcasts. Help us understand, help us connect more to a product, to a wine, to the winemaker, their thinking, their intentions. But there is nothing like sitting around a table and talking about wine. There is nothing like going to an event where you are around other people who have the same interests and affinity as you around wine or around just celebration. And so it really is about taking.
Digital has uncovered this incredible opportunity for us to connect with customers and shoppers in a way that we never have in terms of getting their attention, in terms of like, hey, look at me. But the finish of that, which we thought was all digital acquisition, digital, you know, and it is, there is a portion of that, you know, which is their customers who are just going
to buy online. They don't want to have a relationship offline. But the majority now we see they want relationships offline, but it needs to be linked to what they learn online. So there's a direct. Well, yeah, that's where you, like you're saying is, you said earlier, you go, you go there first. I went there first to see how to clean this Lalik lamp. Oh, I love that. Eventually some of that stuff is great, but eventually it's that connection. It reminds me of when I shifted out of that handshake
sale. I'm gonna tell you, my acquisition costs, you'll love this. In 1996, at the La county fair was $9. I got 1000 customers in 20 days for $9 a person. I believe you. I got that money back in the first shipment, right? Yeah, but that climbed to 150 by the time I was done in 2007. Yeah, but in order to replace that, what I thought was that connection, because that handshake means so much. It still does. You can zoom all you want with somebody. This is an example
of what you're saying. But then when you meet them, it's a different relationship. It changed. Like I was, I was entertaining this woman down in Laguna beach who manages some stuff for me down there, I'd never met her. It was all online, it was all emails. And I was telling my secretary, I think maybe we're gonna change. Well, I finally went down there last week to meet her and I came back. She says, what do you wanna do? I said, I'm not gonna change. She's a nice woman and we had a
great conversation. She knows what she's talking about. And so that relationship was established because we met each other. But when I, when I stopped doing the direct mail stuff and got in mostly digital, I tried to replace that relationship with a video of me sitting at the desk and talking, you know, sincerely and
honestly. And every person that signed up for the club or got a gift got this email from me with a video of them, of me talking to them about, you know, what was going to happen, thinking that would replace the relationship. But it didn't really. I mean, it did in the beginning, but not the end. In the beginning. I don't think you should forget in the beginning. It did. It did when we were all first, like, learning about the Internet and all of these applications and software were making
it easier for us to connect. But I think what we have learned over, especially over the last four years, is that especially over the last four years, is that the physical connection is the heart of who we are as humans. And to be an amazing digital marketer, you have to understand the physical connection. To connect the dots. Then you're not just in the alcohol sector, you're in all sectors. We are. Well, in beverage, and beverage is our focus.
So we'll do kind of our interest really is in the wellness space, and we're looking at different products that really are centrally themed around, you know, just being added value to your life. Great tasting, energetic, natural ingredients. Because we just see really, I mean, just as women, and you asked like, it's an all female collective. We're all women. What makes us different? Well, we, I
get on your website. We, I mean, as, listen, we make the majority of the purchasing decisions in this country, as you well know. I'm sure Sandra would agree with me on this. We like to stop our. I'm not allowed to make those decisions. And we have, our share of wallet is growing, and women have a desire and an interest in wellness that is unique. And it is a different point of view than I think perhaps maybe
the other sex brings to the table. And so I think that our perspective is that we, as women, understand at a very base level what women are looking for in specific beverage drinks outside of adult beverage. Now go into adult beverage, into wine specifically, where we have a lot of experience. We understand intimately what women are looking for in wine. Sometimes it aligns with the male cohort and
sometimes it does not. But in general, women are looking for products that they can believe in and that they feel connected to. That's really, like, the bottom line. They're not. They don't explore as much as a male cohort in wine, which, you know, I know you know this very well. And it's not because they lack the confidence, which has always been what everyone in wine has said, that women just don't have the confidence in, you know, trying all kinds of wines. It's
not really that. It really is. They. They tend to have a very. I find women have palates that are softer than male palettes, and they look for wines that have a specific profile. And when they find something they like, they just stick with it. It's just it. No question. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to stump Sandra with a syrah of some form, whether it's australian, domestic or french. At every time she stops me, she goes, what is this? I go, oh, my God. How did
you figure that out? It wasn't that she knew it was Syrah, but she knew that she didn't like it or it wasn't the profile she was looking for. I mean, she's a bored over idol girl all the way, but is that so connect the dots sort of. Was that spawned at the water cooler at VWE amongst the women there? We have this conversation. It wasn't. We always had ongoing, I mean, being Terry Wheatley, who's the founder and the general partner of camp the dots has been in the industry for over
40 years. And working with her, so much of my work was inspired by. She would always ask me to think deeper, you know, what is it like as a marketer? How do I reach out to customers? How do I engage with them? How do I, you know, what is it that is going to make a difference? What? What makes a difference? When I talk to a customer, and so many times we talk about segmentation, we talk about, you know, we would do like, you know, just, we just would
really talk a lot. And we care very much about what our customers like. And so we talk about it a lot. And then, you know, over time, we're just like, you know, it would be so nice if we could make our own brands and sell it to the customers that we know so well. And it would just. We just kind of throw it out there. And it never. We never really took action until we like it. Just. I. We all just kind of decided to leave at the same time. And Terry, you know, just took some time to
think about what she wanted to do. Jenna, who is one of the partners, who's a vp of marketing, bwe just decided she just needed a break. And I was busy with my omnichannel events company that has been around for quite a few years and which has been growing very in a crazy way, but also just thinking, I still want to stay. I love e commerce. I love digital. I'm a software geek. I am a nerd at the highest level when it comes to tech. You know, I'm a tech person first. The wine in adult bed is
just like my medium in many ways. And Terry just reached out to us, and she's like, I'm thinking about starting this company. I want it to be female focused, and I wanted to have two parts. The first is an advisory where we only pick clients that we want to work with, not clients that we're pitching, clients who know us from the industry, and that we can really help. And the other part is where we do innovation and development, product development, and
we bring products to market on our own. And it was just. That's a huge palette of things to tackle, and I want to have a conversation with you offline about it. Young girl who started a product here. She's launching it this next week, completely female, based in its approach to the marketplace.
I'm really proud of her. She's 19, and what she's been able to produce, the part that she doesn't understand is, once I've got this product and it looks good and it tastes good and all that, but, man, I got to find these people to buy it. You said something really important about this experiential part of this. I think this is what I've hung my hat on the last few years. When. When Groupon started and
people were looking for deal, that's when my. My direct mail results, actually, the direct mail response rate maintained itself to a level that if the tenure of the customer had been what it was years past, we would have done great. But the Groupon culture had created these bargain hunters and coupon redeemers that, you know, caused our lifetime value to plummet, and so we
stopped doing those, and you had to go find something new. I found this in the digital side, too, and I think your events company is what's going to change things. By the way, I did trademark les, Amy Devant, again, I own the trademark, and I had ambitions of bringing it back on behalf of my father. The crest is gorgeous. It's
gorgeous. But what I found early on with the. And you're talking about being a digital geek, and we look at the numbers and we look at the response rates, and we look at the lifetime value, and we look at the metrics, we look at the, you know, the conversion rate, and we look at the, you know, how long the bounce rate and all those things that come along with digital marketing. And what I found,
and I think that connect the dots is fighting. This is a digital marketeer, a consultant can be successful by moving the needle, let's say a point. I don't care what the metric is. They move the point. They move to .2 points, five points. And that maybe that resulted in an extra $10,000 in sales for your company because. But they moved it. They were successful in getting better response from whatever method you were using. Yeah, but unfortunately, it cost you $20,000
to get that ten. And so the, the digital consultant can say, yeah, we were successful. I don't know what you're complaining about. It's like, yeah, but you don't have the same. My bottom line metric is revenue and how much it cost me to get that revenue. Oh, that's profitability. What are you talking about? So connect the dots philosophy is a blend of these things. Keep an eye on the metric, but also managing this experiential part of the sale. Absolutely. I mean, listen,
I think you're saying it well. Digital marketing can move the needle, but it cannot change. It cannot. It's not inception. It isn't. And so inception, or a relation for a product like adult beverage wine in particular, is the moment, and inception only happens offline. That's it. That's a good, that's a great way to put it. You think wine is excluded from, or is it actually probably more plagued with the headwinds of marketing, digital marketing and
such a small percentage actually drink wine or want to experience wine. Is it plagued with that normal amount of people? I think that what's plaguing the industry is innovation. True innovation. Not like coming up with another label with a critter. I'm talking about sustainable packaging. I'm talking about making it easy. I'm talking about ingredients and wellness. I mean, all of the elements that if you look at rtds, just as a comparison out there, you know,
they're killing it. You know, you look at, you know, canned rtds, I'm not going to name one in particular. But their lead is, I'm x amount of calories, and I'm good for you. And, you know, it's. It's. It's. We're Seltzer based. Right. Okay. We know that there's crap in that can and that the only, like, the best, organic, most natural stuff, wellness like, oriented, alcohol based product you can put in your body is wine. Bottom line? Bottom line. And so
why we are not owning that message as an industry? Why we are not actually saying 200 calories for this can or this package or this. The refusal of the industry to shift into this kind of. This area of innovation is the limitation of the industry in my mind. You see people out there trying, and it will eventually happen. But I believe that the wine industry is just. It's late to the game
on this side of things. Now, a lot of people say, well, you know, there's cannabis and there's, you know, other things, and, you know, it's key. And people are drinking less, and it's, you know, you know, dry January, blah, blah, blah, blah. I will tell you, I have younger kids who are a drinking age, and they're as interested in enjoying something to drink as we were as teenagers. You know, what you just said? And I couldn't
write talking points fast enough. Cause we have to do this again because there's so much to uncover, because there are people on LinkedIn that talk about innovation, and innovation can be used as just this cloud. You won't talk about cloud based ideas. Well, you're not innovating enough. But then you go to the market, and you put your camera on a bottle of 19 crimes, and the guy comes alive and tells you the crime he did. Is that innovation? I don't know.
Define innovation. And I wrote a little article the other day. I put it LinkedIn. And I said, history has my back on this, because I think all this stuff is just blips on the graph. It's 10,000 years old. We've been drinking it forever. It's the same as it was 10,000 years ago. They found the shoes of the guy making the wine in the armenian cave at Adeni, and we were selling bottles and James wine coolers in my dad's wine shop, and
they're gone, or they're, you know, much less there. And I think all of these things are just humans jumping into the freight, trying to make a buck. And I can't tell you how many people I've had on my show with this unique idea. I got to tell you, Jessica, this is a unique idea. You know, we're going to put. We're going to put wine in a 200 ML bottle because nobody can drink a whole bottle, which is wrong, unfortunately, that's where I'm at these days. But, you know, so, so
I just. My romantic view of this is it's a blip. And my practical view is, yeah, we got to make a buck and so we got to sell some wine. And these are the things that people are buying. That's one of the points. Another point you made about rtDs, which is fascinating, these Gen Z x l M O p s that talk about biodynamic and talk about organic foods, and they shop at Whole Foods, but they drink white claw, which is nothing, but. It is just, and it's like,
why? Why is the wine industry not jumping in there and being like, stop the process? Well, you were there. You were, you were in the crux of it all. You were in one of the biggest wine conglomerates in America. I mean, and we're going to run out of time here because it's already 50 minutes and we'll have to do this again. But vintage wine states was huge. Wink was huge. $250 million in sales, direct to consumer. All of it sold for $10 million because they couldn't make a dollar on
any of it. Like a Ponzi scheme. I mean, you were right there. How could innovation not occur in the halls of those places? Because the people who were in there, they could not. They had, they were single minded in their obsession of conforming into whatever the industry had and just reselling that in a different. In a different way. Right. Just building a new channel, establishing in the industry that there is a new channel
and this channel is going to dominate. Right? Do you remember, like, it's like, that's why, like, at WSA, like, you couldn't go in there because they were like, you're trying to steal my business. Right? Like, and on some level, it was understood that that was happening because of all of the roadblocks that the wholesalers were putting up. That was that time. There's nothing wrong with that time. I'll buy that. I'll buy
that. There was nothing wrong with that time. It's just the world has changed. And quite frankly, I just think that part of the rejiggering of our industry is that we do need to listen to what the consumer wants. I'm not saying that you get rid of the 750 ML, like, that's always going to be the name that is always going to be it. But we have to find a way to connect with consumers in this way that will lend itself to long term wine drinkers. Because
we're not. We're not doing that very well. We're not handing it down very well. The only thing we're handing down well is what grandparents are giving their grandkids. I'm going to leave it at that today. Fascinating conversation. We have so much to talk about. I know. So much. But we'll do it again. Love to. And we'll continue that thought process because it annoys me when I read from people and I want to counter them, but I don't want to get into an argument online, so I don't do it.
We'll just do it over here. So we'll do that. Such a pleasure to see you again. Thank you for taking the time this morning. Yeah. And we'll reconnect soon. Looking forward to it. Cheers. Thank you for listening to wine talks with Paul Callum, Cary. And don't forget to subscribe because there's more great interviews on there. Way, folks. Have a great time out there in the wine world. Cheers.