The U.S. Drinks Conference played to a packed house at this year’s Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America convention in Orlando. In the first year of this partnership, the drinks conference produced the educational sessions, and plans are to co-locate the two conferences in full next April in Las Vegas.
“Attendance far exceeded our expectations, so much so that we had to find extra seats as people poured into sessions,” said Steve Raye of Brand Action Team, one of USDC’s organizing companies, along with MHW Ltd. and Next Level Marketing.
The Social Media Marketing session led off the conference with a panel of exports representing wine, spirit, trade associations and bloggers. Kit Codik of Liquor.com talked about the importance of engagement and activation across platforms, Alyssa Rapp of Bottlenotes spoke about the importance of leveraging and integrating multiple platforms like Twitter, Facebook, mobile and email.
Other sessions at the conference included brand building, activating the Hispanic market, the three-tier system supported by Bill Earle of NABI, and the importance of brand ambassadors for brand marketing programs as well as off and on premise accounts.
Copies of some of the presentations as well as audio files of the sessions will be made available at www.USDrinksConference.com and www.wswa.org.
