Alcademics.com

The New Madonna Video and Smirnoff Vodka Product Placement

The latest music video from Madonna "Give Me All Your Luvin'" includes some product placement luvin' for Smirnoff vodka. 

 

 

 

It's far enough in the background that it's not entirely clear what the brand is, unless of course one is already familiar with these things. 

The full video is below. 

 

 

Smirnoff and Madonna did some work together this fall in a promotion called the  Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project, in which dancers auditioned to go on tour with Madonna. So I guess it shouldn't be a surprise. 

 

 

 

Of course, it's not unusual for pop stars to put liquor in their music videos, I just don't watch them very often to notice. Lady Gaga did tons of placements as I covered here before here and here. 

 

 

Vintage Bacardi Ads from Casa Bacardi in Sitges, Spain

A couple weeks ago I was in Sitges, Spain for a quick visit to the Casa Bacardi. Don Facundo, founder of the company, was from Sitges.

In their little visitors' center they had a bunch of vintage ads so I thought I'd share a few of them here.

Contest: Blog About Cognac to Win a Trip to Cognac (Sponsored)

Over at the Palate Press Ad Network they're hosting a contest in conjunction with the BNIC (Cognac Bureau), called the 2011 Cognac Writing Contest.

The winner gets a trip to the Cognac Blues Passions Festival, which this year is hosting acts including ZZ Top, Moby, and Aloe Blacc. Second prize is five hundred bucks, which isn't too bad either.

So: you write a post about cognac, submit it for approval, and they give you a stat counter on your post. The first round of the contest is based on number of hits for your post (so the sooner you get started the better), and then a panel of judges chooses the winners in the second round (so don't just make it a bunch of search engine keywords).

I've been to the Cognac region with the BNIC and they do a lovely job as hosts. So if you were thinking about blogging about cognac, now might be a good time to do so.

And should you need inspiration or information, the cognac posts on Alcademics are here.

Read the rules before you get started, and good luck!

Top Ways Liquor Websites Fail

Nearly all liquor websites are terrible for those of us looking for product information, brand history, or recipes. 

These things, you would think, would be their prime focus. As I spend a lot of time looking for product information, I have to deal with these sites all the time. 

Without realizing it, I have switched to an operating mode where I won't go to the website but will hunt down the PR contacts for the brand to send me information. Sometimes the PR contacts literally copy and paste the information from the website into my email, but you'd be surprised at how often the website information differs from the press information. 

Most liquor websites are so bad they are unusable despite spending thousands of dollars on them. Here's why. 

The Top Annoying Liquor Website Traits

• Having the 21+ check on the intro page be anything more than a yes/no question. (I understand it may be corporate policy, but it's one that cuts down on visits.)
• Having to put in the day/month/year of the 21+ check by erasing the values preset in the boxes ("mm/dd/yyyy") - so that's about 20 keys clicks before you can get into the site.
• Having to also include the country of origin in the age check. (If the age is over 21, isn't it legal in every country?)
• In the country of origin age check,  the top markets like USA/UK aren't the top selections- so you have to scroll down past Uganda to select them. 
• No "remember this" option for the age check
• A "remember this" option for age check that does not automatically forward you past it, so "remembering" it only does any good if you've bookmarked an internal page.
• The website is an all-lifestyle site with music and happy people drinking the product, with no product information.
• The website is only commercials that you can see on television. 
• No clear "music off" button on every page.
• The "music off" button resets to "on" when you switch pages.  
• A flash welcome screen or site, so it doesn't work on many cell phones. 
• All text is images or flash, so you cannot copy and paste the information. 
• Especially recipes, which you may want to copy and paste to print out and have somewhere near the bar, rather than the desktop computer in the office.
• All recipes are video demos.
• A "creative" recipe database like a kaleidoscope or blob that lets you only find random recipes rather than specific ones you want.
• A general misunderstanding of making things "fun to explore" vs. "hard to find".
• A zillion recipes with no search function.
• All the information/history/product information in a tiny little textbox with a scroll wheel. What about the other 80% of the page space? 
• Not up-to-date for months after new products launch.
• Auto-resizing your browser.

Top Good Things Few Liquor Websites Do

• Have a "media" section with shareable product/bottle/drink images
• Link to your official Facebook and Twitter and YouTube accounts
• Have contact information: an email that someone answers or a referral to your Facebook/Twitter accounts if someone answers that
• Rich information - the site offers deep research, tours of the distillery, geeky specifics for those who want it. 
• Have a lifestyle section, but it is launched from a "launch the site" button rather than being the entire site. Then go ahead and resize the browser. 

The Fourth Annual Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards

Another year, another Tales of the Cocktail convention in New Orleans, another chance to rank the swag! I started giving the swag awards in 2007. 

• 2007 Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards
• 2008 Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards
• 2009 Tales of the Cocktail Swag Awards

Once again this year they had a gifting suite rather than a swag bag, wherein you were able to fill up a sack with anything from the room. This is what made it home with me. 

I have a lot of swag around the house (and nearly all my jackets and t-shirts have a booze logo on them somewhere), so I try not to take stuff just to take it. I grabbed a bunch of Firefly Sweet Tea Bourbon from the suite, as I knew you can drink that stuff without any mixers back in the hotel room. I saw writer Jason Wilson with a flask of a Dubonnet Cocktail (Dubonnet, gin, bitters) created from all swag items- nicely done. I recreated that in the room as well.

I typically don't have time to make (or the inclination to fight the crowds for) the swag-rific tasting rooms at Tales, but I did receive a few items outside the gifting suite like the full bottles of Angostura rum and Geranium Gin. 

 

I was also handed this year's second place swag winner, an absinthe spoon from Tempus Fugit Spirits. They had the spoons custom made with the skull design, and as a joke kept the real spoon at the end. I will probably use this spoon for every meal and not just for absinthe. Alas, though, the spoon was not heavily-enough branded with the Tempus Fugit name, so it cannot win the award for Best Swag at Tales this year. 

That honor goes to Aperol, for their orange sunglasses. 

Hip enough to be popular, using the color of the product and subtle branding of the name on the side of the sunglasses, inexpensive enough to give out tons of them, extending the brand beyond the bar, and keeping in line with the brand's image (a sunny summer spirit), Aperol knocked it out of the park for Best Item of Swag this year. 

That said, there were tons of items of swag I'm sure I didn't see. For those who attended, what was your favorite item of swag? 

Content and Social Media versus Traditional Media

Like most everybody, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the new role of social media and the decline of traditional media. But unlike a lot of people my livelihood depends on one or the other. I'm a freelance writer who blogs, hoping that if money stops flowing to one income stream it will flow into the other.

On the journalism end, companies are spending less on advertising. Since advertising pays for the journalism that surrounds it, there are less newspapers and magazines around, and those still around have reduced their size. Thus there is generally less journalism work around for those of us who freelance. (And a lot of unemployed staffers.)

Many companies who formerly advertised in traditional media are "shifting" to social media, but this shift helps create a content-free world. Here's how:

Because with social media companies/brands can now speak to consumers directly, they play in the social media space by "engaging" bloggers and others online. They may make games or have a blogger of their own. They send out recipes and often samples. They join in the conversation about their brand. This is all good.

But what I see as the problem is that conversations usually take place around content: the weather, a feature story, news of the day. Social media, including most blogging, is a conversational space but not a content generator. 

As brands shift their spending power toward social media, they are hiring bloggers and facebookers and twitterers to talk about their brands. This is internal spending; PR. But they're not so much buying ads in this space or doing much (so it seems) to generate content. It's more "Hey we're here. Talk about us!"

Though advertisements in traditional and social media are very static, boring things, they fund journalism and content creation for the content that goes around them.

Thus in the current model, No more ads = No more content. Imagine Facebook/Twitter if it was only internal. It would be all messages like "I had the best sandwich today!" and no sharing links to news stories or other outside content. Awful.

The internet has devalued ads (thanks, Google!) and also devalued content (thanks, copy-and-paste!), so that in the social media space there doesn't appear to be any reason to bother with content generation or advertising if you are a corporation. 

As someone who makes a living generating content, I'm worried about all of this. One one hand, journalists are being starved out of the industry. On the other hand, are corporations morally obligated to advertise to keep journalists employed? Unfortunately not.

I haven't thought of any workable solutions to this, and neither has anybody else that I know of. In the meantime I am hoping luxury brands who can afford it keep buying ads in traditional media and toss the occasional website sponsorship my way. Right now content isn't seen as a necessity because there is plenty of it still floating around for free. But in the not-too-distant future content may become a luxury item again.

Thanks for Something

Remember in June when I received pretty much the best press kit ever- an empty bottle of liquor? It was from Knob Creek in a press release called "Thanks for Nothing" about the shortage of Knob Creek. They'd run out of barrels of the stuff to bottle.

Word on the street is that there were plenty of supplies of it already in bottles so I don't think any stores actually ran out of it, at least not in California, so it was more of a potential shortage than a real one.

Anyway, last week I got another package from Knob Creek, this one announcing that we'd made it through the drought and the aging barrels reached nine years;  old enough to bottle again. And luckily this package contained a bottle that was full. Whether there was actually a shelf shortage or not, that was reason enough to celebrate.

 

Gaga for Vodka

Lady Gaga's new video "Bad Romance" has some product placement in it, this time for Nemiroff vodka. I usually don't care about things of this nature, but when Lady Gaga does something it's good to pay attention. In her previous video for LoveGame, people were apparently drinking Campari out of the bottle on the subway while watching Gaga dance. How this impacted sales of Campari I do not know.

In Bad Romance, we get a flash of the bottle in the beginning then a second shot of it being poured into a glass around 2:28. 

(If you can't see the embedded video, click here.)

I did some internet sleuthing to find that this bottle is Nemiroff Lex. The Nemiroff vodka website says, "Nemiroff Lex is the vodka for the Great, the Successful, the Courageous, for those who change this world and hold it on their shoulders."

Whatevs.

A hint of the production is in this poorly translated section (with my bold-ings): "The delicate bouquet, emphasized by the linden-tree blossom flavour, inimitable irreproachably mild taste… The alcohol used in its production is aged for up to 6 months. Besides the classical vodka purification technologies, the water-alcohol mixture that is used for production of Nemiroff Lex undergoes additional processing with a specially prepared adsorbent." I'm guessing the "adsorbent" is additional filtering.

Additional information on the branding of Nemiroff from 2003 can be found in this story on brandchannel.com. It's a Ukranian brand that Wikipedia says, "At the end of 2006 Nemiroff became the 'second largest vodka producer in the world' (by sales), trailing only Smirnoff." Guess those sales must be outside the US.

Anyway, that's what I can find for now.

P.S. How many outfit changes are in this Lady Gaga video, like 35?