Ep. 699 Erica Deucy | Get US Market Ready With Italian Wine People

Thanks for tuning into my new show. Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. I'm Steve Ray, author of the book how to get US Market Ready. And in my previous podcast, I shared some of the lessons I've learned from thirty years in the wine and spirits business helping brands enter and grow in the US market. This series will be dedicated to the personalities who have been working in the Italian wine sector in the US, their experiences, challenges, and personal stories. I'll uncover the roads that they walked shedding light on current trends, business strategies, and their unique brands. This episode is proudly sponsored by Vivino, the world's largest online wine marketplace. The Vivino app makes it easy to choose wine. Enjoy expert team support, door to door delivery, and honest wine reviews to help you choose the perfect wine for every occasion. Vivino, download the app on Apple or Android and discover an easier way to choose wine. Hi. This is Steve Ray, and welcome to this week's edition of Get US Market Ready with Italian wine people. I'm very pleased this week to have as a guest, Erica Ducey, who is the chief content officer at Picks Wine. Welcome to the show, Erica. Look forward to to our talk. Thank you so much, Steve. I'm thrilled to be here with you. You know, I always love to chat with you. So excited for our conversation. Well, in this case, you're gonna be doing most of the talking instead of me. So that that will be the difference. Well, give us a little bit of background of you professionally and how you got to where you are. I mean, we met when you were a couple of steps backward, not backward, but, you know, earlier on your journey. And, you've made some big leaps sit. So Yeah. Definitely. So I really come from a background of big publishers So I worked for a lot of big publishing companies. I ran the travel brand photos at random house, way back. I ran the digital for Savor, which was a food and wine and travel publication, ran digital at conde nast for architectural digest. And so a lot of my earlier career, even at the digital director level, was really about helping brands learn how to grow their audience and create content for what at that time was more of an emerging digital audience. So I, you know, worked with a lot of big brands and then got to a certain point in my career where I had, as a side passion gone through all the Samuel certifications through W Set and had written a cocktail book. And I said, you know, I think I am at the point where I want to step away from big publishing, and I want to go back to my earlier roots, which had been in startups. So I did start out at a music startup right at the turn of the century, the big y two k dot com sort of boom and bust cycle. That's where I started out my career. And so I decided to really go down the road of wine as a topic and, approached a company that I had known a lot of people were using called seven fifty. Seven fifty, this was a platform for people in the wine and spirits industry in the US to do a variety of things. And I saw for them an opportunity to start a trade publication. And this wouldn't be any sort of just regular trade publication, but one that really felt relevant to the people who were actually working in the trade, not for the c suite. So for people who are working at retail, Psalms on the floor, importers who were knocking on doors. That type of audience was who I was interested in engaging with. And, so I pitched the concept of the publication that would become the seven fifty daily and went on to work with seven fifty for several years founding and raising up that publication to the point where it won, you know, many, many awards, editorial awards and industry awards. After that, I went over to Vinepair, and Vinepair is the publication in the US with the biggest number of drinks, readers every month at the time had about five million users every month and worked with them for a period where I helped them create also a trade vertical and expand their journalism in some interesting ways. So that was, you know, the next phase of my career and that led us to this latest phase, which is at PIX. And PIX is a wine discovery platform. Now it's behind a closed beta right now. So a lot of people in the industry, you know, may just be hearing about it and consumers also are just hearing about it, but it's a really interesting type of platform because it takes pieces of different different platforms that are out there and kind of combines them in a new way. So one of the pieces of picks is utility, and this is really creating a hub for wine content, on the web. So, for example, if you were to come into pics and, you know, search for some wine, there will be different ways to engage with the content. You could go direct to a product detail page and find all the offers that are related to it, or you can find related collections. So so essentially, on this utility piece of picks, what we're looking to do is you can think about it like like Netflix or Audible. Those platforms do a really good job of taking a vast universe and making it small. So think about, your Netflix feed that you see pop up on your screen. There's, you know, the top picks for Steve, there's the top picks in the US right now. There may be like, you know, horror movies. There's the top trending horror movies. So it's taking these types of rubrics and applying them to wine, which hasn't been done in a really effective way before. And the way that we do it a little bit differently is that we don't just have an algorithm or a machine trying to to do this. We have a team of real people, winex birds who are led by a master of wine David Round based in the UK, and they really are working to create a digestible way to find and buy wine in the US later, we'll expand, but starting out in the US. So that's one pillar of picks. Another is content. Content, you know, as we've as we've just laid out is really my baby. And so I started, the publication, the drop that launched in June. And working with me on that is a renowned wine editor who's based in Germany named Felicity Carter. We also have a staff editor, a staff writer in New York named Janice Williams and various other people working with us as well as a roster of really fantastic writers. So we're publishing many times a week. We're publishing all types of stories, and we're looking for ways to get to people engaged and interested in wine in new ways. So we're not just doing kind of the top, you know, roundups of these are the bottles to buy, but we're looking at, can we get excited, people excited about wines in ways that are kind of unconventional. So actually one of our top performing articles right now is wine horoscopes. That sounds a little crazy, but we actually are laying out each month, all of the different hora scopes, and we have a well known wine writer, Alice firing, matching the horoscopes to the wine. That's super fun. Really? I didn't know that. I know Alice, it didn't sound like what something she would do, but it's interesting to hear. Yeah. That's really fun. And then, you know, we we are looking at pop culture. What are the wines that they're drinking on succession? You know, what are the wines to drink with all of the, you know, television premiers that are coming up in November? So these these kind of different ways of thinking about wine is that that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you go to the site, which is pics dot wine, you'll find our content there, and then you'll be able to kind of get a sense of all the different things we're doing. But that's the second pillar of picks. And then the third pillar is really what we think of as access. And what we mean by that is not a snooty exclusive type of access, but what we're talking about is experiences and early early access to flash sales or discount codes, things that we will be able to provide the users and subscribers of pics. We'll be able to provide them with these additional benefits that those three things together utility, content, and access brings a new type of platform to to the consumer wine buying space that we hope will be really compelling. Wow. Okay. So you're heading up the content portion. The balance of content versus commercial sales. Obviously, commercial sales is one of the revenue models. And content is kind of It's a lot of argument in the industry about, you know, the death of publishing in general and the future of journalism and the role of journalism bias of certain publications, certainly in the general news category, but also even in the wine category. Where do you guys fit on the continuum of super wine geeky only for academics all the way to some very, very simple. You know, here's the five different kinds of wine that you need to know about. Sure. Well, first, I'll make a correction. So the we don't actually sell wine on PIX. So on on PIX, what we're doing is bringing all of the offers that are available to someone onto one platform. So for example, if you were to go on Google right now and search a certain bottle of wine, you may go on to a website, out of a store and get all the way down the funnel and not know that they're unable to ship to you in your certain zip code. Maybe it's, you know, you're in a certain state or what have you that you're not able to ship to. So what we're doing is making all of the offers that we're surfacing them. And then we also are going to be sourcing the different ways that that you could receive them. So for example, we'll list what is the fastest delivery? What is the delivery on a refrigerated truck at some point? We should be able to do that. What is the delivery that is, free? Right? So all of the different use cases or here is the wine that is closest to you, here is the wine, you know, closest to your destination. Those use cases are all things that we're looking to solve for at some point, but we actually don't conduct the sales on our site. So the word that comes to mind is meta. And in spite of the fact that they just changed the name of Facebook to meta or at least the parent company, it's kind of an overarching thing. It's similar. I I think in some respect to like trivago or hotels dot com, would that be a guy? Kayak would be though. Yeah. And I think kayak dot com for a long time was was a similar platform. But your original question was about was about journalism. So I'll get back to that. So it's it's interesting that you say, is this a site for wine geek? Because Wall Street Journal about two weeks ago called us one of the best websites for wine Geeks. And so that that actually is, you know, a consumer publication calling us a publication for wine Geeks, which we love because I think that is definitely one area of content that we feel strongly about. We want to help people build knowledge, and we love debunking things that are sort of rumors or assumptions in the industry about how sulfites work or, you know, any any sort of topics like that. If we can debunk it and if we can find, the facts around a certain topic, we'll jump in and do that. And we we love doing that. Let me jump in right there because that's the question I get asked a lot. You probably do too. I, you know, I'm allergic to sulfites, and then you go into the explanation how well their sulfites are naturally produced in the fermentation process and then needed to be added at some level to preserve the entire yada yada yada yada yada. Well, how did you book that? Well, yeah. We we talk to scientists and and we ask them about it. And we also, you know, there I mean, it's a it's a multi layered issue. You know, we've got there's things in line like biogenic amines and so forth. So there's you can you can go on to the onto the site, read the article, like, learn all of the different layers of information about that particular topic. But, you know, generally, I'd say the thing that we found is that there's not a lot of publications out there that are really doing the original research of talking to scientists who have actually studied these topics. Right? What they're doing is just like asking a couple, you know, people in the wine industry. Well, what do you think about sulfites? What do you think about sulfites? Well, what we're doing is actually going deeper? So that's one area of our content, but another area of our content that's been really popular is our opinion pieces. So there was an opinion piece just this week from a winemaker and author in Australia, Rachel Cygnar, who was talking about, you know, is it time to embrace flaws in wine? And she she she built the case for that. And so a lot what we're finding is that there aren't a lot of outlets for those types of conversations, and we're providing an outlet for those discussions to happen, and we're getting into some really fantastic further discussions on Twitter and on social platforms with people who are on both sides of the issue. So those types of articles are really fun, but, you know, those those are really more the wine geeky side. We also are doing, wine content for people who maybe newer to wine. They want to build some knowledge, or they just wanna have a fun, interesting read related to something about pop culture or to one of the celebrities that they may be familiar with. So I'd say we run the gamut from collectors and wine lovers all the way to content for people who are new to wine. So the style of of writing is very different from what you see in many wine publications because it's not the traditional fruit cherries, smoke, tobacco, fried gooseberries, those kinds of things, descriptors that nobody necessarily really tastes or believes in, but think that's the way it's supposed to be described and discussed. As opposed to, I love Robert Joseph's comment on, do I like it? I mean, he even, you know, has a website called, do I like it dot com. And that's kinda the bottom line there. How do you take the snootiness out of wine writing and and that kind of default to gakiness that people feel, you know, not comfortably part of. Yeah. I mean, that that's a great question because we do work very intentionally with our writers on this topic. So when when our writers are starting to use wine jargon, we really go back to them and query that and ask them to break it down into layman's terms because, you know, we don't need to create additional barriers to wine. One of the things that I noticed working at Vinepere, which was a publication that did both spirits, beer, and wine in terms of its coverage area, is that spirits and spirits coverage really took off over the time I was there. Beer coverage, you know, stayed about steady, but wine coverage started to go down in terms of audience. So my concern and what I think we've seen in some of the industry stats around sales is that wine is losing share of voice. And I think part of the problem is how we talk about wine. So how do we make wine more accessible to more people. That is something that we're working on consistently, and it comes down to everything from, you know, the language we're using. The examples we're giving the way we are framing you know, finding these different ways into wine where we're referencing music or, you know, sports or other areas of people's lives that they feel more comfortable with and using those as a lens through which to get into wine or think about how wine can be relevant through something they're already passionate about. That's that's one of the things we really try to dial in. Cool. I had been toying on and off of writing an article about. We co I've been collecting some of the terms. That we all use. And, just as an example, one of them is minerality. It sounds real. It sounds scientific. It seems to make sense that if you have a a vineyard with rock underneath it that the taste or flavor of the rocks comes through. But if you look into the science of it, no, that's not true because the minerals are breaking down to whatever their smallest unit is and getting absorbed with the water, but they don't maintain their integrity in the plant itself. They get combined into other molecules and so So you don't taste the rock, so to speak. So when people come to me and say here, lick this rock, this is what this wine tastes for, sometimes the metaphor works, but the science beneath it is wrong or not not not real. Do you wanna comment on that? Yeah. I mean, I think I think minerality is an interesting one because there's there's so many different ways to approach that. So so for example, I I tend to like wines that have a like, a salty quality to them. You could call that, you know, a volcanic white from Sicily. You could call that a mineral mineral driven white or, you know, comment on its minerality. But generally, I'll just say something like you know, it tastes a bit salty. You know, you can you can break down those terms and look for ways to make it a little bit more accessible through the language. Like, one of the things that drives me nuts in a similar way is like when people call wine linear, like who is going to know what a linear wine is and what's even the opposite of that? Like those types of terms, I think, scare people away from wine and are not really useful. And I think, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is to our writers and to ourselves is who are we writing this for? Are we writing it for a consumer for someone who's interested in wine and may have varying degrees of knowledge about it? Or are we writing this for ourselves or other wine writers? Right? So I think I think we have to challenge ourselves as the wine community to try to think in in consumers terms. I mean, for the vast majority of people, they're Probably, you know, wine is a thing on their table. They, you know, maybe they have a wine fridge and they collect some wines, but are they really, you know, thinking about it to such a degree that we are? In my experience, that's not true. I'm the wine geek who brings six bottles of wine, you know, in my special wine bag to every dinner party that I go to, and I always try to talk to people about all the wines, and they're like, uh-huh, uh-huh. And so but then when I say something like, Okay. So think about this wine. This wine is like sort of crazy and jagged like, you know, like a David Bowie song, you know, and I like bring in these pop cultural references. That's something that resonates with people. Or you figure out what what it is that they're excited about, and then you you use those references. And I think that's that's like an angle in kind of a a secret backdoor to get people excited is engage them on a thing they know about. And then use that as to something that's relevant. It's relevant. Yeah. I think I I say, we, those of us in the industry and particularly producers, I think our own worst enemy working on a project and trying to audit what they're they look like online. And all it was was bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle with a label plus. It was maybe a bottle lying in a pile of grapes or, you know, a bottle on a dinner table, but there's no lifestyle imagery about it. And at at at one of the things I like to say is, oh, if we can't bring people to wherever, whether it's New Zealand or Italy, how can we bring New Zealand or Italy to them? And so there's lifestyle component about the wine is much more than the wine that the wine Geeks liked about, you know, linear or sharp or acidic or whatever terms that you wanna use, and much more a contributor to whatever the event is. If it's just you and your wife and you're talking about something else during dinner, then it's the conversation that's happening there. Dinner party when nobody wants to talk about that wine, but you wanna talk about the football game, the camaraderie that's going on down there. But yet most producers, you know, jump right to scores, labels, varietals, regions. Yeah. I mean, I think I think it is challenging. There's for producers, I and not being a producer, I can only imagine. But I think looking probably at the US market, it must just feel like this behemoth that is impossible to engage with. And so I think the baseline of engagement is to have those bottle shots to have the descriptions. Right? But then how do you engage with an audience beyond that? You know, if if you've done those baseline things, that just means you're going to be able to supply publications or distributor sites or retailers with the right facts. But on top of that, how is it that you can help people visualize how to engage with your wine? Like, I think those lifestyle sort of scenes, you know, is this an everyday wine? Is this a collectible wine? What types of occasions might this wine be useful for in people's lives? Is this a great gift for your, you know, grumpy wine loving boss? Is this a great gift for, you know, someone else in your life. So I think helping people connect the dots is something that producers can can do. But, you know, I think one thing we have to acknowledge is that it's getting harder and harder on social media for them to, you know, produce some lifestyle shots and imagine that they're going to get much lift. So Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of the platforms, you know, while there's more, you know, TikTok, LinkedIn, yada yada, all of these additional ones, but for for sort of the core platforms, it's gotten harder and harder to build organic reach. And what that means is that you have to engage in a new way. I think in what I see a lot of wine brands doing so successfully is them engaging with micro influencers. So small people who have a small wine following. It could be a thousand people, five thousand people, but if they have good engagement on their social media, maybe it's time to do a social giveaway with them or an Instagram chat with them and the Ymaker. Right? So how do you get your brand involved in some of these types of partnerships, which aren't that expensive to, you know, activate. They're actually probably cheaper in a lot of ways than paid advertising on those platforms. So, you know, my advice to brands looking to connect with different audiences in the United States is to team up with influencers. Don't have to be huge. Can be micro influencers and maybe do a campaign of several talks. And in in each of these talks, you're reaching a different micro audience, but it can be really it can have a lot of traction and result in sales. So that type of pairing and new thinking around content production is is where I see brands engaging effectively. Yeah. Two words that jump into my mind as you're talking about that is relevance and resonance. And he's both relevant to what they're thinking about and things that are important to them and resonates because it gives them something new to talk about. So new knowledge that it imparts our new way to enjoy it. I kind of simplify it to say that the challenge as I'm dealing with producers who are often in the case of wines, farmers, right, and are not communications experts or experienced communications people is better description for you and I because I don't think we're experts at that that is to get them, meaning general consumers, to tell your story in their words to their friends. That's what influencer marketing is all about. And whether it's codified through an ad auction based site or you're paying a fee to an influencer that is disclosed on the web. However, it happens. The real point of the matter is because we know the most important recommendation is not a score. It is not a display. It's one person telling other people, oh, you should try this one. We had it with whatever, and it was really great. Exactly. That's so true. And I think that because it's it's interesting because I would definitely agree that, like, the number one thing you wanna aim for is that positive word-of-mouth from people. Right? So just from someone who loved your wine and wants to talk about it on their social feeds or wants to talk about it to their friends in real life. One thing that's like a little, like, interesting to the side is I think during COVID, I've actually seen the importance of these micro influencers go up and brands, more brands, and a lot of wine brands start to engage with these micro influencers because people aren't seeing one another in real life. So that word-of-mouth has like sort of fade it away as we've all done the social distancing, but there's still ways to engage with those people in, like, the absence of that. So it's, you know, other things to think about, I think, is there's so many wine pod ask now for consumers. Like this one. Well, it's not a consumer one, but yes. Right. So, and so I think, you know, trying to, as an individual wine producer, I I think, you know, pitching podcasts about a hearing on, you know, saying like, hey, I wanna appear on your podcast as a guest, or there's so many newsletters now, little blogs and newsletters. And I think it's it's interesting because you talked about the death of journalism, but I find now that blogs podcasts, newsletters, publications are more important than ever because we don't have restaurants bars at the scale we once did. We don't have real life interaction in the way that we once did. So these things have taken on an increasing importance. So it's it's funny because, like, for a while, I thought, you know, okay, if I were a wine brand, would I really need to employ someone for public relations? And at the time, when brands were able to build their own audience is on Facebook and Instagram, I would have said maybe not. But now that trend has reversed. The cost of participating on Facebook and Instagram has gone way up in person interactions have gone way down. And so what are we doing more of consuming more of these channels, and brands have to find a way to do it at scale. So partnering with micro influencers, appearing on podcasts, appearing on newsletters, appearing in publications, those are all channels to get in front of the consumers that you want to reach. And so it's someone recent recently asked me, you know, should should my brand have a public relations person? I said, you know what? It's actually more important than ever. Interesting. So you had mentioned death of journalism actually this was before it came on air. I the words I used was wither the future of journalism. It just said just like in terms of leveraging it for commercial purposes with PR. There's all this fragmentation of media So there's a lot more outlets. A lot of them are personal outlets. But what about the people who are trained in journalism? Is there a future for them to get actually paid and paid what they're worth? You're one of the few publications out there that actually does pay for it. Now you're gonna get inundated with calls, but but but pays for articles because so many people are willing to do it for free. Where's that all going? Yeah. I mean, I think publishing in general, and this was was one of the reasons that I left the big publishing world, publishing revenue models are broken. And I I don't have the answer to it. I think a lot of brands, including the big ones, like Condenast, are still trying to figure this out. But I what I really see an escalation of is talent owned publications. So what I mean is sub stack, for example, and people building up their small audiences, which may be one thousand subscribers or ten thousand subscribers or fifty thousand subscribers into paid subscriptions. So you're really seeing the trend line of that start to increase where creators are saying, you know what? It's just not worth it to me to pitch to some of these publications for a couple hundred dollars when I could build up my own audience. And I I think that's that's one of the big key trends that I'm I'm seeing because once you own your own audience, you can interact with them how and when you want. And so let me just say that this is not only for creators. This is for wine brands. Wine brands, every single wine brand should have its own newsletter database should be interacting with its audience on a regular basis and working to grow that audience because as every other platform gets more and more expensive to compete on, to advertise on, this is the one channel that you own completely. You're not responsible, like, to whatever Google's SEO changes are, or Facebook's algorithm changes, or any of the other platforms. Once you own your newsletter audience, you own it forever. So growing that audience and having a value added way to interact with them, either you're doing regular content or you're giving offers or you're you're doing a wine club or what have you? There's a million ways to activate on a newsletter strategy, but I would say it is absolutely essential for every brand. Interesting. The the parallel on the, on the trade side is the differentiation I'm seeing in a lot of these direct to consumer or e commerce platforms is who owns the relationship with the purchaser. So with third party delivery sites, like drizzly, my understanding is drizzly owns that and in some sites like city hive and wine fetch, which do the e commerce. Basically, it's white label e e commerce. They own the data. And the retailers that I've talked to say that's a huge difference for them. And that's one of the not few ways, but one of the most important ways to be able to compete with total wine, other big box stores, and other channels that seem to be eroding the retail store, that there always will be a place for a brick and mortar store, but they have to provide more value. And the way to do that is communicating with their customers. Yeah. Definitely. And and I'd also say picks falls into the category of getting out of the way of of the retailer and the consumer. So we we're the match maker, we facilitate that connection, but instead of some of the other platforms that own the data, all of our data goes to so the click goes straight through to the retailer, the retailer owns that transaction, they own that consumer. They have the relationship forever. That's one of the key differences and why PIX as a platform has been so, you know, enthusiastically embraced by and also funded by a lot of people from the wine industry. I normally end, each interview asking what's the big takeaway from that, but you just gave us two big takeaways in your in your presentation. So I I I'm not going to to do that. But I do wanna thank you for sharing the time here as very stimulating conversation and some really interesting perspective on how things are changing both on the journalism side and also on the commercial side of actually buying selling and talking about wine. I I think we all recognize that it's all about the journey, not the destination, and these are just new ways to find out about new things, and there's always something new to find out about a wine, and then share it with somebody else. And then sharing a wine with them as well as the information, that's what makes the world go around and makes us all happy. Yep. It is it is a fascinating time to be in the wine industry and especially on the digital side. There's so much change happening right now. And I think it just behooves wine brands and retailers, and really everyone in the industry to be looking around and saying how can I get involved? How can I connect with consumers in new ways? Because even with, you know, hopefully, COVID will come to an end, but I think a lot of the purchasing behaviors the search behaviors, the discovery behaviors that we grew during COVID are going to stay with us forever. And I think a lot of trend forecasting bears that out, I think it's going to be with us forever. So to be in this area of the industry at this very moment feels like the exact right place to be. If people wanna reach out to you, what email they should use, and also, some of the social handles for you and or pics, So to reach out to me, people can email me at erica, e r I c a dot d at pics dot wine. So it's just p I x dot w I n e. And then my social handles are on Instagram and Twitter. They're both at Erica Ducey. So it's e r I c a d u e c y, all one word. You before the e. I've I've been been been corrected. Thank you very much. My guest today has been Erica Ducey, a good friend in the industry with some really interesting comments from the world of content and commerce. So Erica, thank you very much for joining us, and, for all our listeners. We hope you come back next week and, listen in on our next guest. So, Erica, thank you. Thank you so much, Steve. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. This is Steve Ray. Thanks again for listening on behalf of the Italian wine podcast. Hi everybody. Italian wine podcast celebrates its fourth anniversary this year, and we all love the great content they put out every day. Chinching with Italian wine people has become a big part of our day, and the team in verona needs to feel our love. Reducing the show is not easy folks, hurting all those hosts, getting the interviews, dropping the clubhouse recordings, not to mention editing all the material. Let's give them a tangible fan hug with a contribution to all their costs. Head to Italian wine podcast dot com and click donate to show your love.