Creating A Media Ripple From A Collection Of Fine Tipples

wine-ark is Australia’s largest wine storage provider. Nationally, the organisation cellars more than 3 million bottles of premium wine, conservatively valued in excess of AUD$250 million. Despite this, interest outside of the core industry for wine-ark’s services remained relatively low. wine-ark approached Wilkinson in July 2009, to change this and raise awareness both for their brand and market offering among target consumers.

Working to a tight timeframe, Wilkinson devised a communications solution that would leverage wine-ark’s extensive collection and unique knowledge of wine. The idea was to create a joint industry event to serve as a platform on which to announce wine-ark’s inaugural ‘People’s Choice Fine Wine Award’ and raise mainstream awareness for wine-ark and its services.

Thanks to the combined sheer size of this collection it was possible to accurately catalogue wine-ark’s extensive database and determine which wines are the most sought after and collected by some of Australia’s most famous celebrities, athletes and business people that make up wine-ark’s clientele.

And whilst fine wines have always been rated by critics around the world, no one regular Australian industry benchmark existed to accurately measure the most preferred wines among wine consumers themselves. We had a unqiue and saleable idea to take to the media.

The evening event was held at wine-ark’s impressive Alexandria facility, and hosted by Jeremy Oliver, the highly regarded Australian wine critic. The occasion was designed to spark excitement by securing a combination of representatives from the nation’s biggest labels as well as industry and mainstream media.

Media coverage significantly exceeded wine-ark’s expectations as the story appeared in all national, metropolitan and regional media including print and radio. Wilkinson also secured the interest of popular Fairfax columnist Sam De Brito who featured the event in an online video that has subsequently appeared on both The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s web sites. Thanks to the success of this campaign wine-ark intend to make the ‘People’s Choice Fine Wine Award’ a regular highlight on its promotional calendar.