New York Ag Connection - B.E.V. NY Keynote Speaker Announced

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B.E.V. NY Keynote Speaker Announced
By: Valerie Venezia-Ross, New York Wine & Grape Foundation - 01/23/2020

One of the fondest memories I have of my first year at the New York Wine & Grape Foundation was attending the B.E.V. NY conference. I had a LOT to learn, and having come from the nonprofit association world, this conference format was familiar to me and I felt right at home. That, in conjunction with the welcoming community, made my first experience highly positive and influential in shaping future educational programming at the Foundation.

As with any conference, the content is best determined by those it is intended to serve. This year, in partnership with the Business Day planning team for B.E.V. NY, we decided to ask what educational topics you, the business and management leaders of our state's wineries, need most.

Robust feedback told us loud and clear that you wanted this year's conference to provide more sophisticated, tangible tools for the real-life challenges you're experiencing every day. Seminars aligned nicely into two different tracks dealing with the management of a winery business and the marketing and sales side of a winery.

We're excited to announce that our morning keynote speaker will be Ray Isle, Executive Wine Editor of Food & Wine and the Wine & Spirits Editor for both Travel + Leisure and Departures. Ray will help us address the state of the wine industry from an external perspective. What are other wine regions doing to successfully survive and thrive? How are they grappling with the changes in demographics, wine buying (or lack of buying) trends, questions around sustainability, selling wine online, impending tariffs, and the ever-changing world of compliance? While the afternoon capstone keynote session has yet to be announced, we do anticipate that speaker will dig deeper into one of the topics mentioned above.

Workshop highlights this year include "Marketing Budgeting 101: How to Maximize ROI for Your Efforts," presented by Jonathan Lange, director of account service at Campbell Ewald. Campbell Ewald has worked with Empire State Development for many years to promote New York State tourism and understands our wine regions very well, having been our partner in creating the New York Wine Tourism Marketing Toolkit.

Another highlight will be a topic that was one of the most widely requested via our survey. "Identifying and Selling to Your Target Audiences" will be presented by John Stamell, CEO/founder of Oomiji and Pablo Olay, vice president of Padilla. As they note, "it's easy to identify wine consumers as an audience but how do you find them, identify their differences and align messaging about your brand to what they want to hear and the way they'd like to hear it?" Jon and Pablo have built two of the most successful regional marketing campaigns in the U.S. Come learn how they did it, and how you can put some of the tools they use to work for you.

We are excited to welcome Cathy Huyghe, co-founder of Enolytics and columnist for Forbes.com and Inc.com. She is also the author of Hungry for Wine: Seeing the World through the Lens of a Wine Glass. She will be speaking about a topic near and dear to my own heart - "Big Data: How to Effectively Track and Utilize Sales Information." Understanding big data is a new topic for wineries, especially smaller ones. But by harnessing the power of this information you can direct your own efforts more effectively.

Don't forget that lunch also has its appeal, aside from the obvious. The Unity Awards will be presented from 12:30 to 2 p.m. While you can expect to see the winners of various categories announced throughout the month of February, you will have to attend the luncheon to find out who wins the most prestigious prize, the Jim Tresize Lifetime Achievement Award.

Stay tuned as we unveil more speakers over the next few weeks including the afternoon keynote capstone speaker. We also invite you to join us from 5 to 6 p.m. in the trade show hall, where exhibitors and partners, including Sponsor Farm Family Casualty Insurance Company, an American National Company, will be sharing important information about the services they provide to companies like yours.

As valuable as these workshops will be, and we guarantee that they will be valuable and provide real world solutions for problems you're facing today, the networking and information sharing that you do among each other will be the most valuable. The more of you that attend, the richer the experience will be. The sharing of information across areas of expertise, across winery size and background, from experience in past professional lives, these all work together to provide a deep and unmistakably New York experience, something that you cannot get at any other event.

We are looking forward to sharing updates with you over the next few weeks and we encourage you to register for the business day of B.E.V. NY today. Don't forget that New York Wine & Grape Foundation members get 10% off their first registration. There's no time like the present.

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