Do you recognise this man?

The Stormhoek roller coaster that the last year was is coming to an end and I have to say that things are on the up and up. The picture about was taken from the front page of the Sunday Times. The featured video was posted there because on Sunday night, Stormhoek won the "small budget" brand of the year and the Grand Prix prize for the best brand of 2007 at the South African Marketing Excellence awards held in Johannesburg. We edged out some of the biggest brands in the country like Standard Bank, Nedbank, ABSA, Vodacom and MTN. These are all companies with massive marketing and advertising budgets and bright happening folks. Most of these companies entered only one campaign, we entered Stormhoek because you see there is more to us than just a blog. You see in Cape Town there are only 6 of us and we have managed to pretty much secure the top restaurants, hotels and more recently the big three grocers (yea you will start seeing Stormhoek wines at SPAR, PnP and Checkers - already available in some stores).

We 6 are local winemaker, administration, marketing, DTP, IT, sales etc.

What was more significant about this weekend past is that it highlighted the flaws in traditional media. The awards event was originally scheduled for Saturday so that the Sunday Times could splash breaking news about the awards as they are also the primary sponsor of the event. But due to gremlins in the scheduling the event was moved to Sunday evening and because the Sunday Times is only a weekly newspaper the edge and article had to be moved to next weekend.

But this also highlights the role of the Net in all of this. By Monday morning there were two articles out there and by Tuesday there were 4 pages on Google. Each one with a different take. Of course if I had not eliminated the syndicated articles there would have been 50+ pages.

Another problem with a physical newspaper is that the no and quality and depth of articles is driven by how much advertising space you can sell, what the shape, length, news worthiness etc. of the articles are and I have noticed more recently how sussed your news staff with regards to Digg and other aggregation tools. I mean the Indian guy who married the dog story was first on BBC, I came across it on Scott Adams blog and it finally turned up in the Cape Times 3 days later.

Lastly a newspaper is often categorised by subjects like sport, local, business and those mini newspapers inside the bigger ones. And then you have to wade through the wads of property, small ads etc. to get to where you want to be. I love my RSS reader. Life is so different now.

So bully for Stormhoek, please go out and get your bottle with pride...