Tequila Drinkers Unite
July 9, 2007
Lately, liquor companies have been setting up shop online. Consider Chivas’ redux of Bud. TV. The latest entry into the milieu is The Patron Social Club. Hosted by a nameless suave looking video avatar, the site offers articles, a Patron history and a way to contribute to the sight via reviews on topics ranging from food to drink recipes. The Richards Relationship Marketing division of The Richard Group crafted the campaign along with interactive agency Click Here.
Couple of things: We can’t stand the flash interface and really, Patron shouldn’t like it either. There’s no way for the brand to generate links in or out, which would of grounded their brand content piece by content piece across the internet. The site just launched, so we’re not going to dig on the fact that most of their contributors are paid writers from trend spotting agency Iconoculture.
We will say the tips are nothing you couldn’t find in say, TimeOut and it’s not very social. You can’t actually converse with any of the other contributors.
Screw it – we’re also going to rip on the event coverage. As your white suited guide says, “There’s a lot going on in here.” Too much we argue. The brand has coverage from ProAm golf events to the Indy 300, Forbes’ boating parties and the TFWA Cannes events (we’d linked to them, but we can’t cause, uh yeah… the site is in flash). Actually, we’re not going to call it coverage. It’s more like a three line explanation. There’s only one picture per event and the copy makes every single one of these events sound dull, dull, dull. There’s no reason to stay on this site longer than five seconds.
Oh wait – we’re wrong. We just found a way to ID your bottle of Patron. Did you know that each bottle of Patron is hand made? We didn’t either. The site allows users to enter a bottle number to find out its unique history. Now, that’s cool and educational too!
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