AdAge.com, the large US advertising trade mag, has just released its annual “Marketing 50”. [You can download the PDF off this page here.]

It’s a pretty big deal in US marketing circles etc.

Interesting. It seems a certain Hugh MacLeod, and this small African winery called Stormhoek, made the list [see page 12].

I dunno. Something to with do with blogging or whatever.

“Stormhoek meets Microsoft”

A wee 10-minute video interview I did with Microsoft’s Steve Clayton, back at the recent London Girl Geek Dinner.

Some of the stuff we covered you might have read on gapingvoid already. Steve and I seem to be having this long, ongoing conversation at the moment [“Think of it as a Work In Progress, Dah-ling!”], which I for one am really enjoying. Hope he feels the same.

[NB: This was originally posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.com]

[Bonus Link:] A nice written exchange I had recently with Steve Ball, the chap at Microsoft who, along with Guitar Legend, Robert Fripp, created all the music and sounds for Microsofts’ new Windows Vista operating system.

[Link: “Sideways”.]

I was hanging out with Microsoft’s Steve Clayton and two of his colleagues yesterday [Hi James and Ben, great meeting you both etc], and the question came up:

“So, Hugh, why are you so interested in Microsoft?”

Fair question. Here are some thoughts:

1. Rebirth. A big, long-term interest for me is how both individuals and organizations, once they’ve been around the block a few times, get their Mojo back. As I wrote in September:

“Rebirth” is a wonderful metaphor, meaning everything from “re-invention” to “regeneration” to “renaissance” to… just about anything.

I find that a large part of the human experience is [a] getting oneself into a rut and then [b] figuring out how to get oneself out of it.

What is true for individuals is also true for large groups of people… businesses, organizations, nations etc etc. How do we re-invent our modus operandi? Serious question.

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but it’s a subject that interests me professionally more and more.

And I think it’s a subject that also interests Microsoft more and more. How do they grow? How do they avoid extinction? How do they keep innovating, instead of being calcified to death by their own corporate inertia, something that all big companies suffer from [and often succumb to]?

i.e. It’s a subject that genuinely interests us both. And where there’s genuine mutual interest, there is connection.

2. Robert Scoble. I once went on record saying that Robert Scoble, blogging as a Microsoft employee [N.B. he quit Microsoft earlier this year], was the biggest thing to happen to advertising since Apple’s “1984” commercial.

I took me a while to figure it out, but one day I suddenly realized, the big story about Robert blogging from inside Microsoft wasn’t the effect he was having on outsiders like myself [“Oh, what a lovely blog, I think I’ll go out and buy me a new PC”], but on the effect he was having on his fellow Microsoft employees. His blog was starting conversations that simply could not have happened before the invention of the blog. Why? The Porous Membrane, of course.

This one little insight completely changed and informed my views about the future of marketing. So I have Microsoft to thank for that one.

3. Microsoft is an interesting company. If they weren’t, I doubt they’d get so many millions of words in the mainstream media written about them, every year, like they do. All I’m doing is the same as countless thousands of other journalists and bloggers are doing.

4. Being nice pays off. Thanks to becoming friends with Scoble and the London Girl Geeks in the last year or two, I’ve since met quite a few MS people, and to be quite honest, for the most part they’ve all been well-mannered, interesting, engaging, passionate, very smart people, and I’ve enjoyed their company. Unlike some of the arrogant jerks I’ve met from other companies in my time.

5. They’re in the software business, I’m in the software business. They have a commercial interest in Microsoft product. I have an [albeit much smaller] commercial interest in Thingamy product. So we’ve got that in common.

6. They’re in the de-commodification business, I’m in the de-commodification business. So you think $300 desktop software is ubiquitous? You should see the $10 wine business. Where 80% of the wine sold in the UK is bought by a half-dozen or so top supermarket and retail chains, and the number of commercial, large-scale wineries in the world number in the tens of thousands. You try rising above that clutter, Boyo. Yeah, not easy. Again, where there is common interest, there is connection.

7. Microsoft wants to change the world, Stormhoek wants to change the world. Again, common interest. How well we succeed is always debatable, but hey, you only live once.

[This was originally posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.com]

The groovy cats at K&L Wine Merechants are now selling Stormhoek.

Stores located in San Francisco and Redwood City [click on link for exact addresses].

If you could spread the word to all your West Coast pals, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Looks like I missed a real shindig at Techcrunch party. The Flickr picture above was taken by Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera, and it shows two chaps showing off their signed Techcrunch lithographs, that I drew on behalf of Stormhoek, to commemorate the event.

Robert Scoble did a good job blogging it, plus a good cluster of reviews can also be found here on Techmeme.

Photos: Flickr tag “techcrunch7”, plus Guy Kawasaki has posted a Filmloop.

Congrats to Michael Arrington for putting on a heck of a show. Rock on.

[NB: This was originally posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.]

I’ve started designing the new Stormhoek wine labels, which like I said earlier, should be hitting the shelves by Christmas. This is one of my first efforts, an updated version of a cartoon I drew back in 1998.

To me, wine and the human condition go together like two peas in a pod. So I want the designs to explore that relationship.

Could you imagine something like this on a wine bottle? More specifically, a wine bottle you’d actually take off the supermarket shelf and place into your shopping basket? Yes? No? Maybe?

N.B. This project is still very new. Virgin territory. In terms of label design, I don’t claim to have all the answers. Heck, I don’t even claim to have a tenth of them. But this is one steep learning curve that I am thrilled to be on. Watch this space.

[UPDATE: To see the new lable designs as they’re being rolled out, go here. Thanks.]

[NB. This entry was originally posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.]

This made my day. From the MSNBC blog:

Though it seems mostly as the result of marketing strategy, Stormhoek appears to have established itself as the geek wine.

I like it when the Stormhoek meme gets picked up by mainstream media, even in a small way. As a marketer, it tells me the virus is working. Even more importantly, it also tells the same thing to the people who pay my wages.

What’s interesting to me about being “the established geek wine” or, as I’m fond of shamelessly calling it, “The Unofficial Cult Wine of Silicon Valley”, is the fact that [A] Stormhoek is THOUSANDS of miles away from Silicon Valley and [B] Napa Valley is just up the road from Silicon Valley.

In other words, logic would dictate that the Valley folk would’ve picked a wine a bit closer to home, indirectly or otherwise. But then the blogosphere came along and changed the rules.

Of course, on another level, it should come as no surprise that a South African wine became “the established geek wine”. This is what the internet is all about. Eliminating distances etc.

I’m not sure if I concur with the thought that “it seems mostly as the result of marketing strategy”. Two reasons. First, this implies that marketing was some kind of peripheral thing, an appendage to the main event. This to me undermines just how important marketing is, to everybody alive, not just us marketing nerds.

Secondly, it wasn’t as if me and the Stormhoek boys just sat down one day and said “Hey, let’s just market to the geeks”, for inherent brand reasons. The geeks just happen to be friends of mine, people I know, and people who reads blogs. If our readers had instead been sweet old ladies from Wisconsin, perhaps Stormhoek would now be selling to them.

We live in interesting times.

[YouTube videocast here.]

Stormhoek’s Jason Korman and I recently did a videocast, along with Johnnie Moore. Directed by Lloyd Davis.

This videocast was made not so much for the general public, but for the Stormehoek sales team in America. Trying to get them up to speed with what we’re doing etc. Johnnie kindly agreed to moderate.

[This post was cross-posted on my personal blog, gapingvoid.com]

I see Dave Parmet has been busy. From Valleywag:

“It can’t be a 90s bubble party without Absolut,” says Dot-com marketer David Parmet. “Could we say Stormhoek is the new Absolut?” With marketing blogger Hugh MacLeod pimping this wine in the Valley through branded prints, blogging, and sponsored geek dinners, Stormhoek is the official drink of the Valley alcoholic.

Dave and I go back a ways. He did some really incredible stuff for English Cut.