BDWA 2019 Summit Opening Remarks. Questions to challenge your…
By: Born Digital Wine Awards
Tags: Vinventions, Media, Wine, News, Bdwasummit

Editors note: Reka Haros opened the summit with these thoughts as a way to help us frame the questions we were tasked with discovering.

We are told that we live in turbulent times. One glance at the press and we learn that fake news, alternative facts and lack of transparency are everywhere.

We are pissed off. From climate change to women’s rights and equality, our countries’ populations are standing up and talking. Sexism, misogyny and bigotry are being called out.

We are told that without data we can’t make proper business decisions. But we have so much data available that we don’t even know what to do with it or how to use it.

We hear that e-commerce is upending retail, and we believe that we need to sell online, without a proper understanding of what metrics, platforms, the technology we should be using.

We read that social media is uprooting advertising, so we prioritise short-term metrics over long-term results, creating more distrust in our brands than ever before.

We are told that private labels are replacing brands and that books, TV and advertising are dead.

We believe change is the new normal and that its pace is accelerating. We believe that technology adoption is happening faster than ever. That disrupting companies like Uber, Airbnb and similar are continuously replacing well-established corporations.

With all this in mind, our levels of anxiety rise. But.

What if we are wrong?

On e-commerce: While we believe e-commerce is the future, Amazon and other online-first stores are opening physical stores because experiencing products and brands remains essential for consumers.

We might perceive Amazon to be huge, but in the US, it represents only 7.7% of all retail sales. Despite being the most significant e-commerce player with ~50% of total US online sales, it still only accounts for roughly 1% of global retail.

Bricks-and-mortar still dominate retail. This doesn’t mean that e-commerce isn’t important! Embracing digital strategy to become omnichannel is crucial for bricks-and-mortar retailers if they want to stay relevant. But don’t fall for the line that online is taking over the world.

On brands, advertising, books, radio and TV: Private labels aren’t killing brands; they are an evolution of what a brand can be for consumers and retailers. Private label brands are still brands; what changes is the control over the ownership and margins.

The advertising world isn’t being replaced by social media. The blurred lines between online and offline advertising show how advertising is transforming and adapting to new outlets and new media channels.

Books, TV and print media aren’t dead. Data shows that TV is still the #1 used media across all generations, that radio is often used for more hours than social media platforms, but we seem to ignore radio. Oh! And books are not dead, just transforming, and still providing growing figures worldwide.

On the pace of change: While futurists tend to be provocative and persuasive about the pace of change happening around us, the truth is, we’ve always lived in a fast-moving world. We just think this is unique to our times.

Elbert Hubbard, a writer, artist, and philosopher who died in 1915, said: “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can not be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” Francis Bacon, roughly 500 years ago, said, “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator.”

In 2015, the Boston Consulting Group published this article that showed the amount of time different technologies have taken to reach 100m users. It was highly influential, yet a WSJ’s investigation revealed that when the same data is analyzed on a proportional (50% of households) rather than an absolute threshold (100 million homes), the truth is that radio (8 years) and TV (9 years) reached 50% of households faster than PCs (17 years) and mobile phones (15 years).

The US did not even have 100 million households until the late 1990s — so this chart is misleading to make us believe that technology adoption is happening faster now.

On disruption: Contrary to our beliefs, disruption isn’t happening faster than ever. According to Eurostat, ten new businesses were born for every 100 existing businesses between 2012 and 2015 — but 8.5 of those also died.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s data shows that the number of new businesses with potential for employment growth has been stagnant since the 2009 recession.

It’s true that companies that don’t adapt with times are the ones that stay behind, but Nokia and Kodak are two great examples of how evolving into different business areas can save them from disruption.

On media:

“Does the news reflect what we die from?” is an excellent example of the gap between how often something happens and how often it’s reported.

When analyzing data behind causes of death in the US, it turns out that there is a considerable gap between reported causes of death, and the actual frequency of those deaths in the real world. Although terrorism gets a huge amount of coverage, the biggest cause of death in the world is heart disease.

It’s easy to believe that things are worse or more dangerous than they really are. But it’s not true.

Let’s stop for a moment: Now looking at our change-reluctant industry, shall we question our beliefs and “truths”?

We believe that the wine sector is left behind, that its pace to update itself is too slow, that private labels are bad, that big brand is evil, that social media marketing is entirely fake, and all marketing is evil.

We don’t need to look at the new and shiny. We don’t like novelty; we want to hold on to what we know and feels familiar like scores, tasting notes, wine educations and awards — yet the world is moving on. We don’t welcome innovation, and instead of evaluating them, we shut the door.

Can we challenge these beliefs?

Is it time to have an honest and transparent conversation about innovation, evolution and regression in the wine industry? Where do we stand? What is an innovation? What is an evolution? And what is a regression in our industry?

Is it time we stop and reevaluate what we do?

The answer was yes.