Recipe & Food Sites Wanted
August 30, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
For Gourmet Ads, Q4 is the business end of the year; see a recent blog we wrote for advertisers and advertising agencies called Q4 Advertising. As such we’re looking to expand the number of recipe sites and food blog in the Gourmet Ads network. Ideally you’ll be producing your own food content on a regular basis and have a great base of traffic.
What we’re specifically looking for is quality recipes sites or food blogs featuring unique content or sites that have strong traffic in either or all of these countries; USA, UK, Canada and Australia. We’ve not got dedicated advertising sales team in each of these counties and Q4 has a good sales pipeline of advertising campaigns booked, meaning you’ll earn revenue as soon as you’re approved into our network. Join the Gourmet Ads network now.
Key features and benefits of Gourmet Ads for publishers include;
- Non-exclusive relationship
- Majority of advertisers are companies in the food, wine, beer, travel and lifestyle space.
- CPM based advertising campaigns
- Sponsorship advertising campaigns
- Total control over campaigns – ability to approve or reject advertising
- Advertising Portal to manage your advertising inventory
- Control over advertisement pricing (set minimums and auto rejects)
- Ability to mange your own unsold inventory (or run your own house ads)
- Flexibility and scalability – we can manage some or all of your inventory
- Strong focus on advertising campaigns in USA, Australia, UK and Canada
- Monetize your content globally – sales teams in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Sydney
- Paid monthly via Paypal, Check or Wire
You may have your own internal sales teams or be part of another ad network. That’s fine with us, because we offer a non-exclusive relationship which means you can use the Gourmet Ads network as back fill. We ask that if you do work with another ad network that you offer all networks an equal allocation.
Finally, for all publishers we offer a free program to help increase your traffic, called the Gourmet Ads Traffic Booster Program.
Both Recipe Sites and Food Blogs will still have to comply with our eligibility criteria, but September is when Q4 kicks in, so now is the time to join the network and start serving ads as soon as you’re approved. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Join the Gourmet Ads network now.
Online Drives CPG Sales
August 28, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Last week the leading research house Comscore released a study indicating what many in the online advertising space have believed for sometime, that online advertising can be as effective as television advertising in lifting retail sales of CPG brands.
The Comscore study, based on a 200,000 panel of consumers who were members of grocery store loyalty programs, indicated that online advertising lifts retail sales of CPG products by an average of 9%, compared to an average lift of about 8% from TV campaigns (measured by Information Resources, Inc). Advertising campaigns for brands in a variety of CPG product categories, including cereal, cookie mixes, pizza, juice drinks, snack bars, pasta, tea, deodorants and toothpaste, were examined.
From what we understand the CPG Sales study not only tracked online behavior, but actual purchases at the grocery store, providing some of the best evidence from online to cash register that we’ve seen. Now there’s proof that Online Drives CPG Sales.
Unlike TV which can really only be limited to location and placement, online advertising provides a raft of targeting options. Apart from standard campaign targeting options, Gourmet Ads provides additional targeting such as Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting which hones in on the target audience which can provide exceptional results for advertisers.
Given that the Gourmet Ads network only runs advertising on approved, editorial selected recipes sites and food blogs we are always targeting the household grocery buyer each and everyday.
Some of the takeaways from this research for CPG markets are;
- Online Advertising is typically less expensive to TV Advertising
- Online Advertising outperforms TV Advertising
- Greater campaign targeting options available for online
- Gourmet Ads reaches the main household grocery buyers each and everyday
- Reach audiences when they are learning and research family meal ideas.
- Measurable performance
If you’re tasked with marketing your CPG products, then download our media kit, or request a proposal for your next CPG product campaign.
Source: http://ir.comscore.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=403695
Why advertise with Gourmet Ads?
August 26, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Last week I was doing an agency presentation and one of the media buyers asked me “What are the ten reasons of why they should buy from Gourmet Ads”. I answered them by providing I think 6 or 7 off the top of my head, but I promised them that I would do a blog which answered their question together with a longer response on each point.
I figured that many media buyers and media planners would also be interested in such a blog, so here we go my ten reasons of why media buyers and planners should include Gourmet Ads as part of their media plan.
1. Editorially Selected Sites
Each and every site that is included in the Gourmet Ads network is editorially selected by myself (Benjamin Christie). The majority of sites we include are hand selected and a small percentage is included from those that apply through out website. We look for food and wine sites that have unique and interesting content, look great but most importantly have a least two ads above the fold. As a rule we do reject a great deal and previously we’ve worked out that of those that apply we reject about 65%, only including sites that adhere to our selection criteria for sites.
2. Total Transparency
Unlike some advertising networks which are a blind buy, Gourmet Ads is 100% transparent to advertisers. Not only do we provide advertisers with a complete network list, but we allow advertisers to cherry pick sites they don’t want to run advertising on. We’re proud of the sites we represent, so it doesn’t make sense for us to hide them from you or your client. Additionally, we understand that a handful of advertisers don’t want to see their ads appear on blogs, so we can make it easy to remove blogs from the media buy if that’s your preference.
3. Multiple Sites
We know that popular websites are critical to your media plan, but one of the greatest advantages of running a campaign with Gourmet Ads is that we can run your campaign across multiple sites providing a wide reaching media buy. By eliminating buying on a site-by-site basis we can provide you and your client an aggregated buy on literally hundreds of sites as easily as if you were buying off just a single site. Also because our sites are editorially selected you can buy with complete confidence.
4. Reach the Main Household Grocery Buyer
Because of the unique content of our network, Gourmet Ads reaches the Main Household Grocery Buyer. Why? Because audience profiling provides data that our audience visits recipes websites to determine what they are cooking for dinner. This offers our advertisers the ability to target consumers prior to their journey to the grocery store or supermarket allowing them to influence their buying decisions before the checkout.
5. Exclusive Inventory
Because we hand pick sites into the Gourmet Ads network, our network is very much considered premium inventory and isn’t available in the wider marketplace. This is due to exclusive sales relationships with our network of publishers. We believe that there is minimal crossover into other networks, and as such our inventory can’t be purchased elsewhere offering advertisers exclusive inventory.
6. Engaged Users
Unlike social networks with limited engagement with advertising, the audience of Gourmet Ads not only engages with advertising, but we know due to post impression tracking that they take notice of advertising they see within or network. Which means that when running an advertising campaign with Gourmet Ads that our audience will interact with advertising, so relevant advertising performs extremely well.
7. Rich Media Capabilities
Unlike other networks, because we run on the Adify Platform we have expanded Rich Media Capabilities that other networks don’t have. The standard across the Adify platform is simple, as long as the size of the files being run for the advertising campaign are under 100k in size, there is no additional media serving costs. So instead of paying for hosting, you can now include a rich media creative for your campaigns providing users with a high level of engagement.
8. Campaign Targeting
Another advantage of using the Adify platform to power the Gourmet Ads network is their suite of targeting capabilities. Not only can we run geo targeted advertising, but we can run targeting for the following varioles; by Vertical, Time and day targeting, Bandwidth, Browser & Operating Systems, Language and Frequency capping.
9. Behavioral Targeting
Targeting possible consumers or retargeting them during an advertising campaign can help increase the success of your campaign. A consumer that has already been introduced to your product is more likely going to purchase when re advertised to. Once again using Adify’s Behavioral Targeting capabilities we have a wide range of variables that we can apply to each campaign. These targeting capabilities are vast, but most are for those that have previously clicked on an ad or have simply just seen the ad.
10. Campaign Reporting
Apart from post campaign reporting, Gourmet Ads provides advertisers their own dashboard which shows impressions, clicks, post impression tracking, conversions and more.
Canadian Sites Wanted
August 25, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
No matter if you’re in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto or Vancouver, The Gourmet Ads network is looking for recipe sites and food blogs in Canada to join our network.
What we’re specifically looking for is quality recipes sites or food blogs featuring Canadian content or sites that have strong Canadian traffic. Sites will still have to comply with our eligibility criteria, but we are keen to expand our publisher base in Canada.
With Gourmet Ads now having a dedicated advertising sales team in Canada we’re seeing a good sales pipeline of advertising campaigns, meaning you’ll earn revenue as soon as you’re approved into our network. Ideally you’ll be producing your own food content on a regular basis and have a great base of traffic.
If you’ve got a blog or website which is focused on Canada or has a great deal of Canadian traffic, then apply to join the Gourmet Ads network now.
Traffic Booster Program
August 24, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, Gourmet Ads launched our free Traffic Booster program for publishers to help increase traffic to their sites and blogs. Each day during June we sent an email with a simple task that publishers can do to help build their traffic. Some days we sent tasks which were search focused; others focused on telling people about your site. Overall there were 35 emails sent.
Many publishers who participated saw significant growth in their traffic, one experienced a 300% increase in traffic after they implemented just a few of our suggestions.
We’ve now turned the Traffic Booster Program into program which runs all the time, so no matter when you join, you’ll get the 35 tasks on how to increase your traffic. When new publishers of recipes sites and food blogs join the Gourmet Ads network we highly recommend they participate in the program.
If you publish a recipe site or food blog and want to join our free program visit the Gourmet Ads Traffic Booster page.
For publishers that are not part of the Gourmet Ads network, then you can apply here.
Publisher Ad Serving
August 23, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
For the majority of sites which are part of the Gourmet Ads network, most will simply drop our ad tags into the code of the site and we’ll run 100% of the impressions. Gourmet Ads runs on the Adify platform which in many ways is a huge ad server so sites don’t need the added complexity of their own ad server as well as all the business rules associated to get going. From a monetization perspective this is the most ideal solution as we are selling your ads around the globe.
However for a limited numbers of publishers (we tend to see this on bigger sites only) this isn’t the most ideal solution. We’d recommend using an ad server to give you significant control on how ads are served on your site. It also means that you run multiple ads through the one ad space. We see a lot of the food blogs that are part of our network think that they need to run a number of ad units on a page, like running 3 skyscrapers for example. Not only does this look terrible, but the clickability of the page also decreases which means your page isn’t performing and we could optimize you out of the buy. But this isn’t the case anymore, as most ad servers are free these days.
Unlike other ad networks, Gourmet ads is non exclusive with our publishers which means you can run other networks. However, we do ask that you provide us an equal allocation to any other network running within your adserver. So sites wishing to use an ad server typically will fall into one of these categories;
- Have an internal sales team and using Gourmet Ads as part of the ad serving cycle.
- Wish to use geo-targeting, i.e. running Gourmet Ads in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia and other providers in the other countries.
- The need to run a different ad provider in each category of the site ie Gourmet Ads in the Food section and another provider in each category like Auto, Travel, Small Business etc.
- Prefer to use multiple sources of advertising such as Gourmet Ads and say Google Adsense.
The ability to run multiple ads from different providers will be very appealing to some publishers. We personally don’t recommend any one ad server to our publishers, but here are a few ad server related links to help you navigate the next step.
- Openx hosted – free, plus great geo targeting features and simplicity of use.
- Google Ad Manager – Very complex to setup, only suitable for very large sites with complex rules.
- Blog about Free Wordpress Ad servers
- 7 Great Ad Serving Solutions
Finally, if you’re a publisher and not part of the Gourmet Ads network, you can apply to join here.
Interstitial Advertising
August 22, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Advertisers on the Gourmet Ads network are always after high visibility for their brands and as such, we’ve recently introduced Interstitial Advertising into our suite of offering for clients. Interstitials advertising are a format that is gaining demand in online advertising and represent one of the most impressive ways to make customers aware of your product or brand.
What is interstitial advertising?
Interstitial advertising is when a splash page is displayed before an expected content page and thus attracts a high amount of response as they blend fairly well to the content page. They typically display for about 10 or 15 seconds and then take the viewer to the desired content page. On the destination page, roadblock advertising can be used to reinforce the brand message.
Most interstitials advertising is a HTML static page, however we’ve recently been receiving creative from clients and advertising agencies which include either rich media or even video content. Its important to note that interstitials advertising should be contextually relevant to the destination site, otherwise the engagement levels will be reduce for obvious reasons.
Also the key to interstitial advertising should be keep the creative concise, captivating, straight to the point as well as making sure that the ad loads fast.
Frequency Control
Usually an interstitial advertisement is capped to display once every 24 hours (1/24) and the mandatory use of frequency controls ensures a positive user experience. The last thing you want to do is running persistent interstitial advertising.
Benefits of interstitial advertising
- High Impact visual presence
- Extreme level of engagement
- Break out of the banner mold
If you’d like to run interstitial advertising on the Gourmet Ads network, then request a proposal from us or download a copy of the Gourmet Ads Media Kit.
Q4 Advertising
August 20, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Q4 is just around the corner and for Gourmet Ads, Q4 is considered the business end of the year for us. Generally speaking, companies such as food, wine and grocery and their advertising agencies reserve the majority of the annual advertising budgets for Q4. There are a number of reasons why this is the case which we’ll address a bit later, but lets first look at why traffic increases during Q4.
Year on year, publishers during Q4 tend to see an increase of approximately 20-25% compared to throughout the year. There’s the obvious environmental reasons such as cold weather outside encourages people to stay in and go online. But add to this, the volume of consumers who are searching for recipes increases greatly during this period. Take for example the search “Turkey Recipe” which is illustrated in the graph below and shows the intense amounts of search during this time for that search throughout the tail end of Q4.
So because the traffic across the Gourmet Ads network grows during this period, we also increase our overall reach of the network. Which means that advertising at this time of the year allows you to capture, influence and engage audiences online, increasing sales and revenue.
So what else contributes to an increased spend in Q4 advertising? There are a number of events and general consumer habits that trigger the increase in advertising budgets. We’ve highlighted a few including;
- Thanksgiving ( see Thanksgiving Advertising )
- Black Friday Shopping
- Christmas Shopping
- Christmas ( see Christmas Advertising )
- End of year travel
So it makes sense that if you’re tasked with marketing a product during Q4, then you need to start media planing and media buying right now. We’ve heard horror stories from advertisers who didn’t book premium inventory in advance and were left advertising on lesser networks and websites which didn’t perform, and thus revenue was reduced. Also the earlier you start media planning the better CPM rates that can be negotiated. Media Planing a few days before Thanksgiving and you’re going to pay a high CPM for your campaign.
If you’d like to receive a proposal from Gourmet Ads to run a Q4 advertising campaign, then Request a Proposal from us right now. Be sure to highlight the dates you’d like the campaign to run as well as key audiences that you’d like to reach.
Privacy Policy for Publishers
August 18, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Gourmet Ads works with advertising agencies around the world and more and more agencies are requesting that sites in the Gourmet Ads network publish a privacy policy. Shortly, some campaigns which are booked will only run on sites that have a privacy policy publisher. Therefore to ensure you maximize your revenue we ask that you publish a simple privacy policy.
Your Privacy Policy should clearly disclose that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your user’s browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website.
You may wish to get your own advice, but to make it easy, we’ve developed a short list of links which may help develop your site’s privacy policy.
Sample Policies
www.bbbonline.org/privacy/sample_privacy.asp
www.ownterms.org
Major Publisher Privacy Publishers
Yahoo Privacy Policy
BBC Privacy Policy
CNN Privacy Policy
When you’ve published your Privacy Policy, please send us the link so we can make sure you receive all media buys going forward on the Gourmet Ads network.
Reaching Moms
August 18, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Across America there are over 82 million moms who control over $1.3 billion in household spending each year, making them one of the most sought-after consumer segments for advertisers to reach. Apart from the obvious such as being the household grocery buyer, moms play pivotal role in house decision making such as finances, travel, automotive and clothing for the family. Ask any food advertiser or advertising agency and they’ll tell you that their main target demographic is about reaching moms.
So where are moms online? The good news is that moms are already online, in fact research indicates that the vast majority of moms go online at least once a day researching topics such as parental advice, clothing and of course food. There is no doubt moms rely on the Internet in terms of making purchasing decisions which means you need to be engaging with moms online.
When it comes to food, moms are looking at recipes and advice on what to feed their kids visiting recipe sites and food blogs for ideas. But its not always just about cooking kids meals, Moms are also researching recipes and choosing what to cook for the family dinner. Many moms will go online prior to heading to the grocery store, creating their shopping list after browsing recipes online.
The key in reaching moms online is to ensure any advertising creative is clearly directed / aimed at moms. The messaging needs to be clear and targeted, whilst not offending moms. It’s also important to mention that advertising to different demographics may require different creative to make a difference.
With all this in mind it shows how important reaching moms are online. If you haven’t got a strategy for reaching moms online now is the time to start. Because a large proportion of our audience has kids, Gourmet Ads makes sense so it’s essential to include us your online media plan.
If you’re interesting in running a campaign aimed at reaching moms, then request a proposal from Gourmet Ads or download our media kit for more information.
