Category: final projects

Eugenio Zuccarelli and Fernanda de Araujo

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Background 

How climate change is impacting millennial winos and To invest in Wine, Invest in Climate Change

For our re-imagined project, we used the Instagram video format from Olivia and Smara’s “millennial winos” sketch and the advocacy angle of Eugenio, Tyler and Neil’s “To Invest in Wine, Invest in Climate Change” sketch. We created a full 1-minute Instagram video, with stock photos and videos of people drinking wine, vineyards as well as images associated with climate change. We also interviewed Valeria Ricci from La Mesma winery in Italy, through Zoom, and used short clips from the interview throughout the video. We used an eerie soundtrack that is both reminiscent of such Instagram videos and signifies the danger wine production is in due to climate change.

Because this is an Instagram video, our audience is social media users, especially those in their 20s and 30s. The images used in the video are of young people enjoying wine in social settings, so we hope viewers will see themselves in the images. Our main goal was to alert wine consumers in their 20s and 30s to this very real impact of climate change and galvanize them to take action.

For our impact assessment, we focused primarily on investigating whether the video changed viewers willingness to pursue climate change action, such as donating to climate change funds and changing their personal behavior. We generated a Google Form that asked viewers 4 questions (one assessing previous knowledge about the issue and the rest o evaluate the base willingness to take action), had them watch the 1-minute video, and asked 3 follow-up questions to see if they were more likely to change their actions now. We also shared the video on Instagram and saw how it performed in the first 24 hours.

Google Form: https://forms.gle/aBC2pPLDsbSQzGjT6

Results

We shared the form with audiences in their twenties but without restricting to only wine connoisseurs at the beginning. By doing so, we were then able to collect more responses, and assessing their expertise in the form, we were able to only select those deemed passionate or wine savvy. We received 32 responses, 18 of which marked as savvy (people that self-assessed 3 to 5 in a competency scale up to 5).

On average, wine-savvy survey responders initially think that climate change’s impact on wine is 4.22 on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 5 (a key driver). After having watched the video, the same people report a 7% increase in perceived threat, stating that, on average, the impact of climate change is 4.50. More importantly, when asked “How willing are you to change your behaviour to ensure wine’s long term survival?”, people initially report 3.22 out of 5, while 3.61 after watching the video, an increase by 12%.

Finally, when asked whether they would donate to support a cause to ensure the long-term survival of wine, respondents report only 1.56 out of 5, while 1.83 after viewing the short piece, still remaining relatively low. 

Because our data sketch is in the format of an Instagram post video and meant to be viewed by social media users, we also chose to share the video on a private Instagram profile with 117 followers to see how the video performed. In the first 24 hours, the video accrued 47 views (40%) and 10 likes (8.5%). The last 11 videos of the Now This News (2.3 million views) profile had an average of 133,840 views (5.8%). Obviously, a private Instagram has a curated list of followers compared to Now This News that are more likely to watch a video, but still a solid performance for a 1-minute video on wine and climate change. 

Sam Ihns and Claudia Chen

For our impact assessment, we collected feedback on the wine label sketch (here) from the maps/creative maps unit. Because this sketch came from a commercial perspective, we sought to survey the most promising commercial audience. We found that in the U.S., over 40% of all wine is consumed by millennials (source), so we surveyed 20 millennials to gain more insight about the effects of our historical wine labels. 

Before iterating on the labels, we wanted to figure out what people got out of the wine labels and how they interacted with the labels. We also wanted to find which of the three wine labels was most interesting/enticing. Our test plan was to send out a Google Form (pictured below), first getting insight on their drinking habits, then asking them to summarize the wine labels in one sentence and what their favorite label was.

The breakdown of our respondents’ drinking habits is as follows:

The breakdown of people’s favorite labels is as follows:

Overall, people liked the Champagne 1941 and the Bordeaux 1868 labels the most, but for vastly different reasons. People who preferred the Champagne 1941 label preferred it because they felt it had the most interesting and compelling story involving human beings. People who preferred the Bordeaux 1868 label preferred it because they felt the aesthetic and font matched the historical time period the best. People also said that they tended to read larger things like cereal boxes instead of smaller shampoo bottles, and that the labels themselves felt crammed and could be difficult to read in a sitting where an entire bottle of wine would be used. Finally, people said the map was difficult to read, so we shaded out the other countries. With these points in mind, we pivoted to produce a boxed wine label instead of a wine bottle label.\

As far as understanding effects of the labels themselves, people tended to be more interested in stories that were more directly related to human beings. For example, the Bordeaux 1868 label was about The Great Wine Blight, and survey respondents recognized that the blight was largely out of the hands of the winemakers, making the story less interesting than the Champagne 1941 label that talked about direct contact and communication with Nazis. We also found that people had drastically different interpretations in their wine label summaries- about 50% were acutely aware of the use of the historical perspective to sell more wine, while the other 50% were more focused on the story being told on the label.

A few people also mentioned that they felt negatively after they read the label because the story told wasn’t particularly happy, which could impact a wine’s sales negatively. However, it wouldn’t be good to deliberately make a sad historical story happier just for the sake of commercial sales/making the audience less sad. To balance this out, it would make sense to narrow our target audience down to history bluffs more and millennials in general less. This would also make future impact assessments more concise.