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Food & Wine holiday guide offers direct purchase via app

Food & Wine magazine is offering wines for direct purchase via a mobile image recognition application.

As part of its December issue, Food & Wine is showcasing six wines, which are available for immediate purchase using the Drync app. The campaign directly links the magazine's readers with its advertisers.

"I love Drync because it adds value to our wine advertisers," said Wendy Mure, vice president of marketing at Food & Wine, New York. "We're always looking for wine opportunities like that.

"We're not in the wine retail sales business," she said. "This gives us the opportunity to offer that now as service to our clients.

"Drync approached us, and it was an easy no-brainer. We love that we could do it so easily and so quickly."

Wine pairings
This is the first time that Drync has teamed with Food & Wine to promote its app and wine sales. The Drync app enables users to find, track, share and purchase wine by taking a photo of a wine's label, which then attempts to find a match in the app's database of 2 million wines.

The Drync app campaign is included in Food & Wine's 2013 Essential Holiday Party Planning Guide, which is part of its December issue now on newsstands.

Alongside every bottle of wine featured in the guide is copy that reads: "Buy this wine from your smartphone with the Drync app - Just snap a picture."

A free shipping promotional code is also shown.

In addition to purchasing the six wines featured in the main holiday guide, Drync app users can buy any wine pictured in the magazine by taking a photo of its label.

"You could pretty go much to any wine bottle, any advertisement, any article by a wine enthusiast, and take a picture of those wines," said Aimee Cronin, marketing director at Drync, Boston.

Success recipe
Oftentimes people are challenged to remember wines they have read about, tasted at parties or talked about with others. The Drync app solves this dilemma.

Upon matching a picture of the wine to its database, the app provides information, winemakers' notes, collaborative ratings and product pricing.

Users can purchase wine using the app and have it shipped directly to them.

"We find that people want to buy the wine in the moment," Ms. Cronin said. "They also want to buy something they've read about and that was mentioned to them.
 
"Food & Wine is a great publication for people who love food and wine," she said. "It's a great target audience for us."
 
The Drync app is available on iPhone. An Android version is to be released in mid-December, and an iPad app is to be released some time in 2014.

Food & Wine magazine digital edition readers can take a picture of their tablet's screen using their smartphone and the Drync app.

The Drync and Food & Wine magazine pairing is just one way that the app's marketers are targeting consumers. Drync will track sales from the campaign.

Ms. Cronin said more joint promotions with Food & Wine are in the works.

"Finding the wine you're craving is very hard," Ms. Cronin said. "[Drync makes it so] you can remember every wine you want to try and most of the time buy it."

Final Take
Kari Jensen is staff writer on Mobile Marketer, New York