SommSelect
SommSelect is an online wine retailer in Sonoma, California led by Master Sommelier, Ian Cauble, and James Beard award-winning writer, David Lynch. SommSelect doesn’t just sell you wine, they tell you their story. Since the company launched after the movie SOMM in 2014, its marketing efforts had been centered around email marketing. With new CEO, Karen Roche, in place in 2019, they decided to dive into DTC retail marketing and build a marketing plan with Undisclosed Location from the ground up. We helped them develop and launch DTC digital content for their various digital and social media sites, as well as exclusive content for their subscribers.
Assignment: Brand Strategy and Creative Development, Audience Segmentation, Social, Collateral, Video content, Series development, PR
BRAND VIDEO: From Somm to SommSelect
Our starting place was to create a video with Master Sommelier Ian Cauble that connected him to the successful SOMM Movie series-often the starting place for new SommSelect DTC customers.
SOCIAL MEDIA
UNLO coordinated their marketing efforts with a 360-approach using Emetry to create psychographic targets: Wine Curious and Wine Centric. We created and measured successful DTC lead generation, paid and organic social creative campaigns across Facebook & Instagram using our media partner Kiosk. During that year we grew SommSelect’s social audience by 66% across the board with an emphasis on Instagram audiences.
66% INCREASE
IN SOCIAL AUDIENCE
Carousel
Video
Static
Holiday
USA Today Wine + Food experience
We created a consumer lecture program for the USA Today Wine + Food Experience in 10 cities to launch a brand-new wine club with a dynamic sommelier led seminar: Drink Like a Somm. As part of that effort, we filmed the action in NYC at the Wine + Food Experience, where we partnered with chefs and developed DTC video ads and creative content.
Promotional Shout-out spots for Wine + Food Event
WINE CLUB COLLATERAL
Drink Like a Somm developed as a wine club to include maps, information, and imagery.
PUBLIC RELATIONS
UNLO initiated the Brand’s first professional DTC PR efforts with Paddle Consulting which led to:
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-Best Overall Wine Subscription by NY Magazine: Drink Like a Somm
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-Coverage across television, print, digital and podcast media vehicles like: The Robb Report, Sophisticated Living, LA Magazine, The Kelly Clarkson Show, In the Drink podcast, Thrillist, Millennial Magazine, Las Vegas Sun, Indy Star, Courier Journal, LA Times, MensBook, Orange County Register, Wall St Journal.
VIDEO CONTENT PRODUCTION
To bring SommSelect to life authentically, UNLO used on-camera interviews shot with Ian Cauble, David Lynch, Chefs from the USA TODAY Wine + food Experience and wine merchants. We partnered with Creative Fugitives from LA and did 5 shoot days to create over 25 pieces of DTC creative content and many, many versions for different social media platforms.
UNLO created a series of 6 short-form videos with David Lynch, the editorial director of SommSelect, called Behind the Label. In the Behind the Label series, David Lynch takes us behind the label to learn intricate details of the wine and winemaker that the normal non-geek may not know.
Some Like it Somm was a docu-series that presented the Sommelier lifestyle and reveals the passion of the people who work at SommSelect.
