Fresh insights into Spanish food and wine

Hiya. Christine Tatum, founder of Media Salad, here.

So, I recently was invited to give a presentation about our company to a sizable crowd, and I needed a simple way to give everyone an idea of how we work — and how our team could deliver smart, savvy market insights to them. As a result, what we call a “public portal” was born.

After all, we can’t show off a “private,” password-protected portal belonging to one of our clients — such as, oh, say, the cyber-security firm that serves the federal government.

C’mon. You know we can’t.

For demonstration purposes, we figured we could settle on a subject that a couple of members of our team are passionate about: Spanish food and wine. We love Spain. (My great-grandmother was from the southern city of Cádiz. My husband played a Spanish tennis tournament to win the money needed to pay for my engagement ring. My children attend an international school in Denver recognized by Spain’s Ministry of Education. I could go on and on …)

My Media Salad colleagues and I also have been following Spain’s troubled economy and various food and wine markets with great interest. The country is working aggressively to export goods and services well beyond its traditional European stomping grounds. Its unique offerings are of fine quality and winning more hearts — and money — around the world. Take, for example, England, where the country’s largest grocery chains are reporting that Spanish foods are outselling longstanding Italian favorites. One grocery-store representative even announced that Spanish foods are the fastest growing segment of new cuisine in Great Britain. Ireland is raving about the flavors of Spain’s traditional tapas, too.

Simply put, we believe American companies will find great business opportunities in Spain — and we know we’re the right people to assist their market research.

The portal we’ve spun up is partially functioning and intentionally designed to provide only an idea of what Media Salad could do for your company or organization. Still, I’m pleased that we’ve identified an information niche that we happen to like — and that also stands to deliver a decent public service. When we looked around, we found very few websites that draw from Spanish news organizations, government agencies and universities, and from sources around the world to deliver to native English speakers a thoughtful, clear and connected look at Spain’s food and wine industries. (Online translation tools are going to get you only so far …)

Sure, you could drop tens of thousands of dollars on pricey market reports — but by visiting us first, maybe you’ll have a better sense of whether those reports would be worth the expense.

We plan to spin up plenty of other “public portals” that are focused on niche information that isn’t found easily. I’ll introduce those as they launch.

And yes, my presentation went well.

Demand for business intel skyrockets

Demand for business intelligence across industries and around the world is growing fast — and workers who are uniquely skilled to gather, analyze and report such mission-critical information are poised to lead their markets.

Global sales of business intelligence (BI) tools generated $10.5 billion in revenue in 2010 — up 13.4 percent over the previous year, according to market research firm Gartner.

Industry experts agree that smart BI tools are only one part of an important equation. For the best results, they must be used by efficient and effective researchers, analysts and communicators.

However, the world’s workforce isn’t equipped to meet skyrocketing demands for business intelligence — which include continual and forward-looking analyses of a competitive marketplace. Colleges and universities are woefully behind in offering instruction that prepares graduates to meet employers’ actual needs, according to an international survey sponsored by Business Intelligence Congress II, a meeting of BI professors and industry professionals.

Of 129 colleges and universities surveyed, only three offered BI instruction at the undergraduate level, and only 12 offered BI instruction in graduate programs.

“Also, students are not being exposed to a BI that reflects real-world context,” said Barbara Wixom, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce who also directs Teradata University Network, which conducted the survey.

Universities are struggling to provide students with real-world training partly because companies don’t want to provide their proprietary information for classroom instruction — making it hard for professors like Wixom to develop adequate BI curricula.

That juggernaut is not going to slow demand for BI-savvy employees. In the United States alone, roughly 190,000 workers with “deep analytical talent” and another 1.5 million “data-savvy managers and analysts” will be needed by 2018, according to projections released in May by McKinsey Global Institute.

Media Salad, Inc., is where the best of fact-finding — the digging, the interviewing, the records reviews, the analyzing, the dot-connecting and the communicating — meets business. Our collaborative team of veteran journalists, economists and industry consultants is uniquely qualified to deliver independent information to support sound strategic decisions. Learn more about our services.