Food Advertising Research
July 24, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Last week, Mediapost published an article entitled Food Advertising Works.
The article talks about a study from Yale University on how food advertising contributes to the eating habits of children. Apart from being an interesting read, I’ve had lots of friends, clients and publishers email or tweet me the article, so I thought I would share it with all on the Gourmet Ads blog, so here it is…..
Food Advertising Works
According to researchers from Yale University, in the journal Health Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, one study of seven- to 11-year-old children found that 45% of them ate more snack food while watching a cartoon that included food commercials than those children who watched the same cartoon with non-food commercials.From only a half hour of television viewing a day, the increase in snacking caused by food advertising would lead to a weight gain of nearly 10 pounds a year, unless mitigated by reduced consumption of other foods or increased physical activity, concludes the report.
The researchers also found that adult participants exposed to unhealthy food advertisements in TV programming ate significantly more than those who saw ads with a nutrition or healthy food message. And, these effects persisted after the television viewing.
In the experiments with both children and adults, food advertising increased eating for all available foods, even foods that were not specifically presented in the advertisements.
Jennifer Harris, PhD, Director of Marketing Initiatives at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, concludes that “This research shows a direct… link between television food advertising and calories consumed by adults and children… food advertising triggers automatic eating, regardless of hunger… ”
For more information from Yale News, please visit here.
Source : Media Post – http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=109614
Advertising to Increase Email Lists
July 23, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Food and wine companies that undertaking email marketing as part of their online marketing mix will attest that a key to success is a healthy database of subscribers. Which means that growing your email list is top priority as well as being a constant exercise. So how do you constantly acquire new customers to send emails to?
Acquisition Campaign
Taking a very direct marketing approach, running an acquisition campaign every other month with large reach to your target audience is one way that you can acquire new emails. Besure to only target sites that are your target audience, otherwise your wasting your marketing dollars. Gourmet Ads food vertical typically reaches females 27-55 who are the main grocery buyer.
The key with an acquisition campaign is to ensure that you have new and exciting creative that encourages people to sign up, as soon as they’ve seen the creative. Your advertising creative needs to explain what you’re offering, how often you send emails and what the key message to why they should sign up. Finally make sure you give something to them when they signup; like a gift certificate or discount coupon.
Competitions
Running a GREAT competition can give your email list a real boost. I say great because most online competitions are very average. A great competition is offering a prize like now other which has a high preserved value and is unique. Create one of these and you’ll not only get great entry rates, but you’ll get entrants forwarding it to friends and even media picking up the campaign. Ideally launched by a wide reaching media buy, once again aimed at your target audience will help boost your email list numbers.
Finally, the key to boosting your email list is not to simply increase your list for the sack of sending to more numbers. You need to boost numbers of relevant users in order to get the greatest effect. Which means that when you’re media buying make sure you buy on networks like Gourmet Ads which have a focus on food and wine. Depending on your targeting, you could apply any sorts of geo-targeting or behavioral targeting.
If you’d like Gourmet Ads to prepare a proposal for increasing your email lists either by a direct marketing style campaign or competition, then Request a Proposal from us, or download our Media Kit for more information.
Free Advertising
July 22, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Everyone loves free advertising, but Gourmet Ads isn’t giving away free advertising.
What we’re offering to registered charities is a bonus for any campaigns they book with us. For example if the charity books 10 million impressions with us we’ll triple it and give them 30 million impressions. That’s 20 million free advertising impressions (sometimes referred to in the advertising industry as bonus impressions).
Gourmet Ads will always look after charities in terms of our rates but we wanted to go that extra step and try and make a difference. To qualify for the free advertising, the charity must be food related and be aimed at helping someone in the world have a meal today. There is nothing worse than being hungry and given the recent economic crisis there are more people than ever going without.
As we are restricting our free advertising initiative to just food related charities, we believe that the advertising campaigns will perform above average. This is because we have an audience of foodies who are passionate about food. Our aim is to really drive some donations for the charities and let them make a difference.
There’s some great food related charities out there that do a fantastic job like;
Plus dozens of other charities around the world that we don’t know about. To qualify for free advertising with Gourmet Ads you need to;
- Be a food related charity that helps someone have a meal
- Must be government registered charity in your country
- Must book some sort of paid campaign with Gourmet Ads
So, if you look after the marketing or advertising for a food charity or know someone that does, please tell them about our Free Advertising initiative. For more information about our Free Advertising initiative, please contact us for more information.
Recipes for 50%
July 21, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
An interesting report from JupiterResearch called “Targeting Online Food Lovers — Identifying Segments and Online Advertising Opportunities,” reveals that 50% of online users are looking for food and cooking information online. Let me say that again – 50% of online users are looking for food and cooking information online.
Monique Levy of JupiterResearch noted that food fans typically are looking for the specific information found on food sites, rather than the more general food information found on health and wellness sites. “Online food lovers use food destination sites and manufacturer sites the most, rather than branded product sites and health- and lifestyle-related Websites,” Ms. Levy said.
This research shows that it’s not just foodies which use the internet to research recipes, but in actual fact it’s the wider internet audience who uses the internet as a resource for food information. This in turn means that advertising in and around recipes can have a huge effect at the supermarket checkout. One thing that the report also indicated was that people are not looking for cheap foods online, rather they are seeking information on gourmet or organic products.
So where does the half of the internet looks for food, recipes and cooking information online? Well if you take a look at the sites within the Gourmet Ads network, they are typically;
1. Recipe Portals
2. Regional Recipe Sites – like Australian Recipes
3. Nich Food Sites – like New Orleans Cuisine
4. Food Blogs
5. Chef and Restaurant sites
Major food manufactures as well as food equipment companies understand that people search for recipes online. Which is why online savvy companies like Nestle and Kraft have developed and published a wide range of recipe and food content on their sites.
So with such a volume of consumers coming to food and recipes sites, it makes sense for food and food related companies to advertise online to reach these large audiences. Add to this the diverse range of people looking for recipes also means that products which are not food related will perform – check out a blog we wrote sometime ago called “Not only Food, Wine or Beer”.
If you’d like to advertise in or around recipes on the internet, download the Gourmet Ads Media Kit or Request a Proposal from us.
Article Source ; http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1004743
2010 Media Planning
July 15, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Its midway through 2009 and we’re already seeing a great deal of advertising agencies as well as food and wine companies undertaking 2010 media planning. From what we’ve seen already from RFPs and general enquiries is that many companies are increasing their advertising budgets across the board in 2010.
Because of the economic downturn, 2010 Media Planning has already seen a number of companies who are planning on advertising online for the first time, as in 2009. Many of the companies we deal directly with in the food, wine, beer, tourism and kitchen appliance industries are all looking at online as a cost effective channel to achieve growth in this economic downturn.
It seems that this increased online trend is rather consistent around the globe, especially in both our major markets of the USA, UK, Canada and Australia. We believe the increased activity with 2010 media planning is because many companies are cutting their outdoor, print, TV and radio campaigns and are heavily focused online where there is real measurable ROI and performance.
Like in 2009, the key for media planners in 2010 is to buy vertically related inventory which has the highest chance of performing. Also taken into consideration is the metrics and demographics of the audience, another key in 2010 media planning.
So how can we help your 2010 Media Planning? Gourmet Ads can help you or your advertising agency develop your 12 month plan to target your audience online throughout the year. By booking media in advance (either 6 month or 12 months) allows us to offer significant discounts on CPM rates and bonus impressions increasing your return on investment.
To have Gourmet Ads help with your media planning, please Request for Proposal from us or to learn more about Gourmet Ads, download a copy of our media kit.
Subscribe to Updates
July 14, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Each week, the team at Gourmet Ads writes a few blogs about food and wine advertising, vertical advertising as
well as strategies to drive customers to your websites and landing pages.
If you’d like to receive an e-mail when ever a new blog is published, please click on the link below.
Subscribe to Gourmet Ads here.
Dont Buy just the Homepage
July 10, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
A few years back if you wanted to advertise on the homepage of a site you’d get great value for your advertising spend because everyone who entered a website went via the homepage. These days, for most websites and blogs the homepage is just another page on the site. Ask any publisher their top content pages, and most will say the homepage barely stays in their top ten content pages.
Why is this the case? Because as the internet becomes much more efficient, users are directed to relevant destinations on websites and not homepages. Think about it yourself when you last did a search for something specific, did you get taken to the homepage or the relevant page in relation to your search term? For the majority of websites this is very much the case with users arriving via a search query in a search engine. Apart from search engine traffic, people are directed to specific pages using all types links on the internet. There’s direct links in advertising, widgets, email newsletters, social bookmarking, viral campaigns, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds and more.
So how can this affect your media planning and media buying? Well it means that if you’re undertaking a campaign for Over the Page, Sponsorship or Interstitials then instead of buying the homepage you should be buying the first impression on a site. This way you have greater reach, than if you had just bought the homepage. You can make a branding impact initially to everyone that visits a site, then using roadblock advertising or sequential advertising you can capture the click on the 3rd or 4th page impression.
If you’d like to look at how you can better optimize your media buying, then download the Gourmet Ads Media Kit or Request a Proposal from us.
Expandable Ad Units
July 9, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Advertisers and particularly advertising agencies are always looking at techniques to engage with an audience online and showcase their brand. One such way is via Expandable Ad Units. Expandable Ad Units do as they suggest; they expand outside of their usual size and spread over the top of the page content, either by auto expand, on click or rollover. Audio and video need to be initiated users directly. Gourmet Ads now offers Expandable Ad Units on all 3 creative sizes, which are 300 x 250, 728 x 90 and 160 x 600. See Gourmet Ads Expandable Ad Specifications.
One of the great things about Expandable Ad Units is the ability to include video not only in the initial load, but in the expand offering a rich experience to audiences. Add to this the increase in real estate allows you to add more features than you’d normally include in an ad unit. Some of the expanding ad units we’ve run are very “widget like” allowing users to interact with them more. You could also collect data from the user, or offer a print out – all done in the ad unit.
In our experience, Expandable Ad Units vastly out perform regular creative by at least 30% campaign to campaign. This because the campaign is visually appealing to the audience, encouraging them to engage with the campaign directly. Combine both Expandable Ad Units and regular display ads together in a road blocking campaign and you’ll have the same sort of reach that TV achieves.
So how could you as the advertiser use Expandable Ad Units on the Gourmet Ads network?
Easy, here are a few quick ideas;
- Showcase a product in a recipe with video and techniques
- Show a map of your all of your stores
- Celebrity Chef using your products via a video
- New wine release with a video from the wine maker
- Food and Wine pairing
- Movie Trailer
- New Car Release
If you’re looking at undertaking an advertising campaign and need to make an impact, consider using Expandable Ad Units. For more information, please download our media kit or request a proposal from us.
300 x 250 – The Top Performer
July 8, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Sample 300 x 250 Advertisement
Some call it the Island Ad, others call it the MREC or Medium Rectangle. Whatever you actually call it, the 300 x 250 Ad Unit tends to be the best performing ad unit across the Gourmet Ads network. When I refer to performer, this is in relation to the click through rate, post click tracking and post impressions tracking for that ad unit. Talking just clicks, we generally see that the 300 x 250 has a click rate 20%-30% higher than other ad units on a page.
So why does the 300 x 250 outperform? This is probably due to its size which helps a great deal as well as how its positioned on a page. Usually they are located in the top right hand side (above the fold) or within the content of the page allowing it stand out when people are reading the text on the page.
Another reason why the 300 x 250 outperforms is that this ad unit is perfect for rich media, especially video content. Gourmet Ads is seeing more and more advertisers running video in the ad unit for either tv commercials or movie trailers. Purely because of its dimensions, video looks great in the 300 x 350 ad unit. Video was designed to be there.
Becoming more and more popular with advertisers is the expandable ad units. We’ve run expandable 300 x 250 ads allowing recipes and other sorts of content to be published in an ad unit. This allows users to engage with the advertiser content on the page. Here we can tracks expands and other interactions providing a different sort of metrics from just the usually click through rate or CTR.
So what are the takeaways from this blog? That you still should continue to provide all ad units for a campaign and if possible use rich media and video. From the outset of a campaign, I would allocate a higher budget into the 300 x 250 space. However ever campaign is different and if an ad unit isn’t performing as well as another ad unit, we’ll recommend moving it to another unit. But keep in mind your campaign might get great results from the 160 x 600. You never know till you run it.
Advertising Helps Me Decide
July 6, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
While I was recently in New York I saw a guy on the subway that was wearing a Tshirt which said “Advertising Helps Me Decide”. While the Tshirt probably wasn’t aimed at media planners and media buyers to wear, it made me think about the message.
Often consumers are not in the market for something that you’re selling, but advertising can definitely spark the interest in a product. For online retailers there’s definitely a “spur of the moment” opportunity to be had with people that are bored at work or home. Just think of the sales of products in the early hours of the morning on QVC or similar. At the other end of the spectrum if a consumer is in the market for a product, then there is no doubt that advertising can play a role in changing the consumer’s intent to purchase their product.
If you want to grab one of the Advertising Helps Me Decide Tshirts they can be purchased here.
