Wine technology company VinTank bought by W20 Group

By Erin Smith

Published: 31 March, 2015

VinTank, the US technology company that helps wine companies manage their social media presence, has been purchased by San-Francisco-based digital communications agency, W2O Group.

VinTank, the US technology company that helps wine companies manage their social media presence, has been purchased by San-Francisco-based digital communications agency,W2O Group.

Paul Mabray, Vintank Paul Mabray, Vintank

Napa-based VinTank has develped software that helps wine brands listen to conversations that are being had on multiple social platforms anywhere in the world. This creates not just opportunities to engage directly with consumers, but gives wine businesses a better understanding of how to sell to them, said co-founder Paul Mabray who started the business with James Jory.

"It is an incredible moment. Boom goes the dynamite!" he told Harpers.co.uk. "The really exciting part is that the wine industry, which traditionally has been a slower adopter of technology, is actually doing something so innovative that it is being acquired by a technology company. It is just really cool that we been recognised for all the hard work."

"We listen to over a million wine conversations a day across hundreds of thousands of social media platforms, which now has been built into the largest database of wine consumers in history. With the resources behind the W2O Group and their analytics capabilities we can actually get incredible sights for brands and consumers," said Mabray.

W2O Group is a digital communication agency that has clients across several industries including technology and healthcare to major FMCG consumer brands. The analytics capabilities of the W20 Group uses social media activity to help with predictive modelling. For example, a client like Warner Brothers, would use their services to predict DVD sales of a film after its release based on the social media activity surrounding the release of the film.

This type of integration could potential help wine companies adopt technology that can better help them engage with consumers through social media, but then feed the data back to the business in a way that help inform future business decisions.

The acquisition means VinTank can offer more analytics backed by data than it could in the past, Mabray said. "We have the software developed but with the additional resources of being part of the broader W2O Group we can make the software work for our customers better, faster and stronger than we could before."

Although several other businesses had been interest in buying VinTank in the past, Mabray said he wanted to make sure the company that bought it kept the wine industry as a focus. "The wine industry is still going to be a major focus for the W2O Group moving forward," he said.

"We have been in talks off and on for almost a year and the deal really came together in the last three months" .

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