You Look Grape! Productions

How One Winery’s Promotional A-Peel Made This Cynical Marketer Put Her Skin In the Game

Goode Job

Goode Job App Video

Goode Outtakes

Goode Photos

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The Job App Video

What makes eight professional women drop everything to shoot an amateur video on the crazy streets of San Francisco for a dream job in the California wine country - all in the middle of work deadlines, school finals, and other pressing life events?

For starters, we knew a great thing when we saw it: a paid job learning about wine with ultra cool folks in one of the most beautiful places in the world– you can’t be serious!

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Dancing with the Jugtown Pirates

Mostly though, we simply wanted to have ridiculous fun together doing something creative. That said, our competitive hard coding quickly kicked in and we found ourselves serious about our mission and pulling out all the stops to produce and market a high quality, winning video (not that we knew what we were doing – but we’ve been there before).

Here’s our story:

As a twenty-year consumer marketer, it’s habit to keep my eye out for marketing ideas and creative strategies that truly capture consumer mindshare and engagement - an increasingly difficult task in this media-fragmented, ad-o-rama world we live in. So whether it’s unique promotional themes or stunts, great blog content, clever taglines, smart brand names, intrusive TV spots, compelling billboard copy, even breakthrough telemarketer scripting - you name it, I notice it.

So when I saw Murphy-Goode Winery’s creative recruiting promotion, I was immediately intrigued, and as it turns out, inspired to throw my hat in the ring – or I should say doo-rag in the barrel.

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Grapes have rights too!

A contest in and of itself isn’t terribly original, but this one effectively combined so many of the critical marketing elements that when integrated, created a killer promotional campaign. Here’s how:

1. Goode timing & tone

There’s vats full of talented people (working or not) looking for something fun, interesting and ideally, meaningful. In Murphy-Goode’s state of California, unemployment has hit a whopping 11%! The fun and uplifting spirit of this opportunity was bound to capture the mainstream’s attention, and become a story the press would naturally gravitate to among all the bad news. This is a Willie Wonka’s Charlie Bucket moment with thousands buying into what they hope is the golden ticket. It makes us all want to be part of it in some way.

2. Goode offer

The prize offer of six months in wine country and $60K in compensation to write and learn about wine is super compelling (even Kathie Lee admitted she might pick up and go – and leave Cody??). In fact, as of June 24^th, 2009, 900+ video applications were submitted and posted to the Murphy-Goode site. It’s truly amazing how many people of all ages and backgrounds put in the sweat to create a video presentation, despite the crushing odds.

3. Goode promotion

A national, multi-channel PR campaign investment resulted in ridiculously great broadcast/print coverage and of course, motivated all those entries. I was surprised how many people in casual conversation had heard of the contest and can only imagine the crazy number of media impressions they received (killer ROI across the board). This is the kind of brand recognition and positive imagery brand dorks like me dream about.

4. Goode website & branding

Their intuitive “A Really Goode Job” micro-site took them no time to create and made it easy to apply and view the user-generated content (mostly engaging, even the crappy stuff a la William Hung of American Idol, Season 3). My oil salesman grandfather reminded me often that there’s nothing people love more than the sound of their own names and to talk about themselves. Most Murphy-Goode applicants proved him right. And naturally, repeat visits by applicants and all of our friends, family and supporters are part of the game as we all voted and checked the leader board ten times a day. We couldn’t help ourselves.

Smartly, Murphy-Goode’s marketers paid off their “Goode” branding at every turn while also directing the windfall of new visitors to their corporate site featuring products and other stuff they have going on. This is a terrific way to create brand/product awareness and telegraph their distinctive brand personality (starting at the top with Dave Ready Jr.’s unpretentious, cool flair and of course, iconic Vikings helmet).

5. Goode viral marketing & community

What friends and family wouldn’t want to help land a dream job like this? People far and wide were roped into the action and the more savvy competitors leveraged marketing tactics of word-of-mouth, mass email marketing, Facebook, YouTube and other grapevines to their advantage. And every single vote grew Murphy-Goode’s blossoming database for harvesting later.

Ironically, Murphy-Goode's quest for a social media whiz failed to take into account social media's impact when they invited the voting public to jump into what they understandably expected was a contest where their votes for Most Popular would determine the winner (it is the American Idol era after all!). Of course, their recruiting criteria was more subjective than that and took many factors into account when reviewing candidates like past wine, food and Internet experience, interests, community work, etc. ^<1> This faux-pas aside, the promotion was a really solid effort by Murphy-Goode.

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Guinness break at SF's The Dubliner

Here’s how our “You Look Grape! Productions”video came about:

The idea was floated over a drink (or three) one night with my crazy friends (affectionately known as The Nutbags). We all have been climbing our respective ladders for 20+ years (partner in a law firm, Lieutenant in the SF Fire Dept., Biotech, PR and Marketing executives, etc.) and relish any opportunity to break out of our routines and collaborate on creative projects simply for fun and a laugh. “Ideation” typically takes place over wine or on the golf course – and, at least once before, resulted in a profitable enterprise.

Our last project was opening a little San Francisco pizzeria calledGialina(2007) - already profitable and named in SF Chronicle’s 2009 Top 100 restaurants, SF Weekly’s Best Pizza, Top 25 Pizza Places in the Nation by GQ, rave reviews in Sunset Magazine, Yelp and on and on. None of us had ever been in the restaurant biz before (and a rising star chef partner didn’t hurt!), but this is an incredibly talented group of overachievers who like a challenge and aren’t afraid to go for it.

We perused the Murphy-Goode promo with the same enthusiasm, watched some of the competition and it didn’t take long for us to huddle and proclaim: “We could DO this!” Personally, not only did I feel passionate about the opportunity, but also I loved the part about Murphy-Goode taking their wine – but not themselves – seriously. My kind of culture, I thought. Work hard, play hard, laugh hard.

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Our super star director

We quickly put our game faces on and were methodical in our strategic planning and creative execution. Two brainstorm meetings (rule was first hour gossip, second two hours project) and we landed on this creative strategy: differentiate from the “look at me-me-me!” talking resume pack and focus on the ideal candidate pairing of personality, interest in Murphy-Goode and ability to engage others on the topic. We decided this was squarely about Murphy-Goode, so we didn’t use our precious 60-seconds to focus on me (my resume would need to speak for itself). We assigned roles and responsibilities, developed a creative brief, script, and held a production planning meeting to prep for the big weekend shoot. I kept thinking we were just like Goodby or Chiat/Day, only, um, different. More like Mad Men, who didn’t smoke and only drank red wine after 4 p.m.

Time was ticking, so the plan was to be as efficient as possible by shooting scenes in just a couple locations. Although we had a script and a sense of what we wanted to capture, our man-on-the-street research interviews produced a bevy of real, “uncorked” personalities answering my “Have you ever heard of Murphy-Goode?” question at San Francisco’s gorgeous Ferry Building. The entire location produced an embarrassment of riches; an absolutely surreal parade of local characters, including a grunge blue grass band named the Jugtown Pirates, who conceived 'n sang a Murphy-Goode jingle on the spot, a contingent of naked cyclists protesting I dunno what, a pedi-cab driver incredibly knowledgeable about Murphy-Goode’s varietals, a wedding party clad beautifully in Murphy-Goode purple, a grandma who admitted putting Murphy-Goode on her finger to get her 2-year-old grandson to sleep, and a circus leprechaun on a 10-foot-tall bike – all willing to talk to me about Murphy-Goode. And among them all was our very own ubiquitous dancing grape (the partner in the law firm) and the adorable 1963 red VW bug with its Yellow Labrador passenger (my 15-year-old, Ruby Begonia).

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Ruby Begonia & the 1963 VW Bug

We had our hiccups. The VW bug wouldn’t start minutes before the Golden Gate bridge scene (it took our firefighter and biotech exec an hour to jump it with much pre/post analysis), the microphone we rented at a discount didn’t work at all, the Ferry Building sent two different security officials to kick us off the property, and we had a team tussle or two with our strong personalities coupled with the tight timing and lack of experience doing anything like this before. One of us missed an important team conference call as she just got the news that her Dad was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer.

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The Nutbags (You Look Grape! Productions)

But You Look Grape! Productions were “all in” to the end, and with our two hours of amazing footage in the “can,” we then edited and edited some more. Perhaps the hardest part was leaving some of that great footage on the cutting room floor. Painful! We called each sacrifice “Sophie’s Choice” and our team lawyer made us plead our case for saving scenes. Strangely, she always won her argument.

Finally, we hit the send button on our little “Annie Luvs Murphy-Goode” video application, and followed up with an impassioned grassroots marketing campaign deployment. We squeezed and squeezed our networks using old and new-fashioned social media outreach (friends, family, extended family, wine clubs - our I Love Lucy scene was shot at Crush Pad San Francisco, lawyer associations, firefighter associations, artists, backgammon clubs, Yahoo! alumni group, softball teams, financial advisors, neighbors, sororities -- whatever we could muster).

The fun, hardworking women of You Look Grape! Productions had a ball making the video and the fun was infectious!

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Our Lil' Grape Sans Suit

The video

The outtakes

The “making of” photos

We quickly discovered to our delight that great content is always ripe for consumption and passionate marketing begets passionate engagement. The response to our video was overwhelming, the reviews effusive and we found ourselves in the top five percent of Most Popular videos on Murphy-Goode's site. We didn't win (I didn't get the job) but there are no sour grapes in this bunch (unlike some folks still griping about the contest rules).

You Look Grape! is proud of what we created and are busy stinking up more Bay Area golf courses brainstorming our next creative adventure. Stay tuned...

P.S. I am honored to be a part of BestThinking’s brilliant new site. I think a whole bunch of grape thinkers will put their skin in the game too. Let great new knowledge pour!

P.P.S. The 1963 VW bug is for sale

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