On buying wine bloggers. A call to resist the dark side

Once upon a time people drank their wine in peace, relying on word of mouth to find what they liked. Then the forces of darkness struck. Inventing powerful spells such as marketing, advertising and sponsored wine journalism they took control of the innocent wine world. But behold, a small army of light stood up to the forces of darkness. Writing truthfully, unbiased wine bloggers would save wine lovers from evil.

Good versus Evil, photo by Helico, licensed CC BY 2.0

Some may believe this, but a closer look at the wine blogging world will tell you it is not that simple. In fact, bloggers are now targeted by the forces of evil in the ways not too dissimilar to journalism before them. Are we aware enough to resist?

For many of us wine bloggers writing is a hobby, so the commercial aspect may not be as obvious to us as it should be. A little while ago "Wine Intelligence" advertised a study with the razzmatazz headline: Wine consumers wary of blogger recommendations. This was based on the claim that "1 in 5 regular wine drinkers" trust "independent bloggers" as source of wine information as opposed to 50%+ who believe wine merchants. Even if you take this at face value, I would argue that influencing 20% of regular wine drinkers is a success, not a sign of distrust.

With this growing influence also needs to come an awareness of us operating in a commercial context in which marketing companies will want to buy our voice. Accepting free tasting samples and invitations to tastings and other events is one thing. As long as bloggers are transparent about this and aware of the context I see nothing wrong with it. Pretty much since the start of the Wine Rambler we have set us clear rules for how to do this. Taking paid ads is something we don't do, but as long as they are clearly marked as such it is up to the visitors of a site to make up their minds about it. What about ads that are paid for but not marked as such though? Increasingly we receive email from marketing companies (usually sent from Gmail accounts) offering money for putting up content and links to their clients' websites. From the increasing frequency this happens to us and other bloggers I would assume that not all of us say no to such offers - otherwise there would be no point in agencies sending them. What I do refer to are emails with offers like this:

I have had a look through your website and we are very interested in submitting a guest or sponsored post with a link back to our client’s site. We have lots of experience in writing content and so the content would be 100% unique.

Usually, we say no to this straight away. The other day I got curious enough to reply, asking for details but also emphasising that we were not interested in adverts, sales pitches or any fake content. Despite making that very clear, this is what I got back:

My client is in the online wine trading industry. And though there would be a couple of link within the post it wouldn't be a sales pitch or marketing post. What I had in mind was a review of a few wines from the cabernet sauvignon grape.

So basically, this is a retailer paying bloggers to publish reviews of wines they sell (or at least wines similar in style to those they sell, if I try to interpret this in a positive way). To me that is an advert and should be clearly marked as such. It has nothing to do with "unique content" for a blog. If we want to be seen as credible, we have to resist this. An advert is an advert and has to be clearly understood as such.