While regional trade organisations “do excellent work”, the US wine trade “does not do a fantastic job” of collective marketing, says agency founder behind anti-prohibitionist campaign.
The US wine industry lags badly behind other agricultural sectors when it comes to funding and sustaining collective marketing, according to Gino Colangelo, founder of New York wine PR agency Colangelo & Partners, who has spent the past four years running a pro-bono campaign to counter what he described as growing anti-alcohol sentiment in American media.
Speaking to The Drinks Business Podcast as his agency marks its 20th anniversary, Colangelo said he began noticing a marked rise in negative media coverage linking wine and alcohol to health harms roughly four years ago.
The beauty of wine
Conversations with wine critic and Wine Bible author Karen McNeil led to the creation of Come Over October, a campaign – now also backed by California-based wine PR figure Kimberly Charles – built around promoting wine’s role in bringing people together, and its status as an agricultural, historical and food-linked product.
“We’re hoping this campaign becomes a movement to advocate for the beauty of wine,” Colangelo said, describing the initiative as mission-driven and entirely donated time on the part of its founders.
But he was candid about the difficulty of sustaining momentum without structural industry support. Unlike sectors such as dairy, almonds or cranberries – which benefit from established collective marketing bodies in the US – wine has no equivalent apparatus, he said, and described the level of backing the campaign receives from companies it aims to help as “frankly, at times a bit discouraging.” He said support, activations and funding for the campaign have come in “fits and starts” rather than consistently.
Sustained marketing needed
Colangelo drew a broader lesson from wine regions and trade bodies that do invest consistently in the US market – citing Wines of Georgia, Chianti Classico, the Prosecco DOC Consortium and Chile as examples of organisations that have built market share through sustained, incremental campaigns rather than one-off pushes.
In a subsequent conversation, he also stressed the “excellent work” by regional trade organizations in the US like the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, Finger Lakes Wine Alliance and Napa Valley Vintners.
Groups that “come in with a big program and then disappear for two years,” he said, typically fail to build lasting traction.
He likened market presence to driving an electric car rather than a petrol one: “You take your foot off the accelerator and it stops… If you stop, you will lose your market share real fast.”
Countering the headwinds
On the underlying question of whether the current US downturn is cyclical or structural, Colangelo said he believes it is fundamentally cyclical, but warned that the length and depth of the downturn depends directly on continued industry investment in marketing and advocacy.
“If we’re aggressive and we promote and we communicate and we advocate, then we could shorten that cycle, and the trough won’t be quite as deep,” he said.
Come Over October and similar sector-wide advocacy efforts are likely to face continued pressure given wider headwinds, which Colangelo cited later in the conversation, including competition from THC beverages and RTDs, the rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, and broader “sober curious” and moderation trends among younger consumers.
As previously reported on by db, Come Over October – along with Share & Pair Sundays – have become the largest pro-wine grassroots campaigns ever launched in the US – reaching just shy of 3 billion impressions in the media with another 5.6 million on social media.
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