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Ben Ellefsen, Atom Group
- 1. Marketing to Appeal to a New Digital Generation INTRODUCING ‘PAY PER SIP’ Ben Ellefsen – Sales & NPD Director
- 3. Distribution and brand development Brand creation & ownership
- 19. Distribution and Brand Development Brand creation & ownership
- 21. 2010 Launch
- 27. Move into sponsorship – Slot Sales 2012
- 29. Launch of ‘Pay per Sip’ 2016
- 31. Launch of ‘Pay per Sip’ 2016
- 32. Relaunch of ‘Dram Club’ 2017
- 33. Calendars & Sets - £1 per delivery Dram Club - £1 per delivery Pay per Sip - £1 per delivery* hi@drinksbythedram.com *Plus £1 manufacturing cost, plus liquid. Includes bespoke targeting & inclusion of marketing materials Utterly Shameless Advertisement
- 34. Calendars & Sets - £1 per delivery Dram Club - £1 per delivery Pay per Sip - £1 per delivery* hi@drinksbythedram.com *Plus £1 manufacturing cost, plus liquid. Includes bespoke targeting & inclusion of marketing materials Rate Card
Editor's Notes
- Good afternoon everyone - my name’s Ben Ellefsen, and I’m the sales and new product development director for ATOM Group
- Who or what is ATOM Group?
- We are 3 discrete business units existing symbiotically, but separately. We share some back-office functions, but by and large we operate independently. Between these three companies - we own the entire value spirits chain from product inception right the way through to end-consumer sales and - crucially - data.
- Okay - so I’ll start with Master of Malt - as it’s the easiest to explain. Founded in mid 1980s as an independent bottler - which morphed into a retailer - which changed into an online retailer - we were probably the first shop to sell whisky online back in the late ‘90s (when, obviously, no-one was buying whisky online). In 2008 we re-capitalised, brought in a new management team and we relaunched in 2009 with a brand new website platform which we built ourselves from scratch.
- Maverick drinks is our distribution agency. It was founded in 2013 in order to distribute the ATOM Brands (which is the third group company) range - the logos above represent some of the brands that we own But Maverick quickly became more than that...
- From the word go (and thanks to our head of brand development - Michael Vachon) we were lucky enough to be able to work with some of the best craft distillers in the world. The bottom row are some of the world-class brands which we don’t fully own, but which Maverick distributes.
- The hird business unit is ATOM Brands - This is our vehicle for getting the madness out of my head and into existence so that I can sleep. ATOM Brands is a brand inception, design and manufacturing business. This came about when we started to realise that the fun part of all of this (not to mention the profitable part) was owning the entire value chain from inception to delivery. You probably recognise a few of those logos - but I’ll give you a brief overview just in case:
- Ableforth’s Launched in 2011, and produces Bathtub Gin, Rumbullion, Summer Fruit Cup, Sloe Gin, Cherry Brandy, Cold-distilled Absinthe and many more fantastic craft spirits.
- The Blended Whisky Company Launched in 2012. This is our high-end blended whisky label - producing very small batch whiskies such as The Lost Distilleries Blend, The Golden Age Blend and The Half Century Blend
- Origin was designed to showcase the effect of Terroir on the growth of Juniper. These are a range of 24 single-botanical gins all taken from specific Juniper growing locations.
- Darkness! Are a range of extremely heavily sherry-finished whiskies subjected to secondary maturation in fresh, custom-coopered 50 litre sherry casks
- The Handmade Cocktail Company - A range of classic back-bar cocktails - Negroni, Old-Fashioned, Manhattan, Boulevardier etc.
- Bitter Bastards - A range of single botanical centrifugally extracted cocktail bitters
- Forget you ever saw that. Blearch.
- That Boutique-y Whisky Company is probably a brand of which you’ve all heard… It’s an independent bottler, we’re just about to hit 100 individual distilleries and blends, and if you own a distillery - yes - you should come and find me afterwards.
- This is a project we launched last month - it’s the sister company to That Boutique-y Whisky Company - and works in partnership with some of the world’s best gin distilleries, brands, and people to deliver a curated portfolio of unique gins, including...
- Moonshot Gin. This is a gin made solely using botanicals that have been sent into space at a shade over 24 Kill-o-Meters… I mention this - well - mainly because it’s awesome, but also because you should all have a sample of this on your table so that you can see the physical presentation of the next brand...
- Drinks by the Dram. Our Sample service - producing 3cl samples of a vast range of spirits.
- So - to come back to the group-level slide - we’re going to look at the relationship between two of these companies.
- There’s a significant feedback loop that exists here - Master of Malt stocks over 10,000 individual SKUs, and sells to hundreds of thousands of consumers every year. We log every interaction that they make, every preference, every click in fact, and that is a LOT of data. As far as platforms for assessing the relative performance of various brands in a marketplace go - there isn’t really anything better. ATOM Brands has the ability to take that data, and create products on a very short development cycle which fit with ever-shifting consumer trends. I’m going to talk to you about just one of those brands we looked at just now...
- Drinks by the Dram launched in 2010 - and was what turned out to be a very complex solution to a very simple problem. That problem is that as an online retailer, we’re unable to physically interact with our customers. They all come online, checkout, and if all goes well (despite the fact that we have 24 hour 365 day customer service) - they never even have to talk to us. If you work in a whisky shop, and one of your regular customers comes in, and says they like Ardbeg, you might entreat them to try Lagavulin (or vice versa) - and you’ve probably got a sample bottle of each from the brand. We can’t do that, so...
- We developed DBTD as a ‘remote sampling’ service - allowing people to try before they buy on a range of spirits (currently 5707 individual lines). The service started off with individual drams. After launch - we saw a huge jump in the number of people buying samples (especially of expensive whiskies), then coming back to buy the full-sized bottle. This makes a lot of sense of course - you or I might take a chance on a £50 whisky - but a £500 whisky? What about £5000?
- In 2011 we began to offer tasting sets following a specific theme - we currently offer around 100 different sets exploring themes like: Regions of Scotland Old and rare whiskies, Japanese Whiskies Sherry Monsters / Peated Whiskies
- We also offer a huge range of tasting sets specific to brands, and can even incorporate design cues from those brands - as you can see above.
- In 2012 we launched whisky and gin advent calendars - which it’s fair to say were a runaway success. Over the past 4 years we’ve added many other spirits types - rum, tequila, mezcal, and many more. We now have 30 different SKUs, including the calendar on the left - which is a £10,000 Whisky Advent Calendar.
- Now - In the years since launching Drinks by the Dram, you can probably see we got a bit carried away with the number of lines we produce. But something began to dawn on us. This isn’t, at heart, a “product business” - well - it is - and it’s a really good one, but… What it really is, is a marketing business - an experience business. Furthermore - it’s an experience business which is currently delivering well over a million sample experiences per year - and over 98% of those samples are from tasting sets and advent calendars - ie they’re curated. They’re curated by us. STEP BACK Hmm…. NEXT SLIDE
- HHHHMMMMMMMMMMM. [drums fingers together] Now - it is important to say that we do take that concept of curation very seriously. We’re only ever going to work with brands that would delight us personally if they turned up in a set we were given as a gift. But the opportunity for brand involvement here is epic. Just take the Whisky Advent Calendar as an example...
- On December 13th last year - there were in excess of 10,000 people all across the world all opening their whisky advent calendar, all sampling Balvenie Doublewood 12yo - all sharing in the same experience. This year there’ll be over 20,000 - and that’s just one of the 30 different advent calendar SKUs. Now take a second to think about the fact that each and every one of those 10,000 people have paid for their calendar. These aren’t hit-and-run consumers, they’re not casual samplers at an event - these are people prepared to part with £150 in order to have that experience. What’s more - they’re prepared to part with £150 in the peak season for them to make personal decisions about what to buy other people for Christmas presents. If there’s a more intensive, better bought-in brand sampling programme anywhere in the world - I’ve not seen it.
- Last year we took the programme a step further. Opportunities for inclusion in curated tasting sets and calendars are excellent, but they are by definition passive (albeit with an element of choice from the consumer). We wanted to turn this passive process into an active one, and enable brand owners to reach out and sample *exactly* the consumer demographic that they want to - with zero waste. Let’s go back to this slide for a second:
- To recap - we’ve got Master of Malt - shipping its hundreds of thousands of orders a year - we’ve got DBTD producing millions of samples, and because we built our website platform outselves, we’ve got the ability to intercept Master of Malt’s order data - in real time - and to include samples, and marketing materials in individual, targeted customers’ orders. NEXT SLIDE
- So let’s run an example… You want to get your product into the hands of consumers who conform to the following criteria: Have previously engaged with your specific brand Have a delivery address in central London Have spent a lifetime average of over £100 per bottle Have a purchase frequency of more than one bottle per month Have purchased an Islay Whisky in the past 3 months Have a lifetime spend in excess of £10,000 Who is not a gift-buyer (is buying for themselves) That’s something we can do - fulfilling samples of your brand - together with your marketing material - to consumers targeted to your exact requirements - and what’s more we can do it on outbound orders, so that it’s not unsolicited. If I had a microphone, I’d drop it and walk off stage right now.
- This is something of a ‘coming soon’ - it’s worth noting that we did pioneer a spirits sample subscription service back in 2012, before putting it on the back-burner to focus on the other businesses we’ve just discussed - which were expanding much more rapidly. We’ve now added significant management bandwidth, and are going to be re-launching Dram Club in spectacular fashion in few weeks time. In the short-term - this will be a product sampling service allowing consumers to choose a spirit type, an order frequency, and a specific level of expenditure. In the medium-term it’s going to allow individual customisation, giving users the ability to tweak their preferences and get a more bespoke experience. In the long-term - this is going to morph into the Netflix of Whisky - ultimately using a data-driven approach to pre-empt each customer’s specific, ever-changing tastes and drive them through a curated journey of discovery. In fact it’ll be better than Netflix, as our plan is to build a community around this whereby people can not only rate the whiskies, but can also discuss and compare notes with like-minded people. And of course - there’s the opportunity for brand involvement here, too.
- Oops - that’s the wrong title...
- So. There we go. There’re minimum order quantities, obviously, and it’s worth noting that we can also commission consumer research off the back of all of these - post-contacting the customers with requests for feedback, and so on. Thank you for listening.