Diet After Easter
March 30, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Easter is about food, especially chocolate and hot cross buns. So it isn’t unusual that a great deal of diet and health food companies kick their advertising campaigns of on Easter Monday. Maybe bound by guild of eating a stack of chocolate after Easter a lot of people use this as trigger to kick off their diet. So for advertisers in this space it’s about being in the right place at the right time.
So who do most diet companies wish to target? The household grocery buyer, who is mostly female and aged between 25-55 year old. This person in the home influences the family eating habits and make the choices about whats going on the dinner plate today. So gaining the attention of this person in the household is key to any campaign success. Recent
Already booked this Easter is a number of well-known retail diet advertisers who are seeking to take advantage of the post Easter diet phase. These diet advertisers are running a range of creative from standard IAB sizes through to expandable creative to really gain attention of readers.
Generally speaking (as every campaign is different) diet advertising which works on Gourmet Ads includes advertising of diet books, diet programs, diet products you buy in the supermarket (i.e low carb, low fat), diet meal replacements (shakes) and of course meals which you have delivered to your home each week. Also advertising campaigns which focus on Gym memberships also provide good results. Gyms that focus on female only membership have performed very well in the past.
Some Comscore Index’s in relation to Dieting on the Gourmet Ads Network include;
- Index 267 for having searched for Diet Program information online in the last 6 months
- Index 146 for having spent under $25 for Diet meal replacements (e.g. Slim Fast) in the last 30 days
- Index 319 for having spent between $25-$49 for Diet meal replacements (e.g. Slim Fast) in the last 30 days
- Index of 251 for going to a gym or healthclub within the last 6 months
- Index of 135 for having a weight problem (25 lbs or more overweight )
Gourmet Ads has strict controls when it comes to the diet advertising. We can’t accept advertising that we call “fat ads” (the ones where is a thin stomach and a fat stomach on the ad) and any ads which make false and misleading claims. We prefer the advertiser to develop creative around food or simply use great messages reinforced with a strong call to action.
If you’re interested in running your next diet campaign with Gourmet Ads, then please download our media kit or request a proposal from our team.
Brand Safe Environment
March 5, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Gourmet Ads works with well-known brands right around the world and one of the important things we strive to deliver each and every day is a brand safe environment for our advertisers and their ad agencies.
So what does a brand safe environment mean? A brand safe environment is one where advertisers can be rest assured that their advertising will run on approved premium websites. There has been unscrupulous ad networks in the past who’ve been trafficking premium brand advertising across brand-damaging objectionable content, causing major PR issues for all of those involved.
The Gourmet Ads Brand Safe Environment
We believe that technology sometimes has its flaws, so we prefer to use a manual process, coupled with technology to ensure our brand safe environment. As such Gourmet Ads ensures a brand safe environment for advertisers in three separate ways;
- Transparency to Advertisers
Prior to any advertising campaign going live, we provide advertisers a full list of sites that are part of Gourmet Ads. We do of course add sites all the time, but overall we do offer total transparency for our Brand Safe Environment. - Hand Selected Editorially Selected Recipes Sites
Websites can’t just join Gourmet Ads and start serving ads straight away. First off every site must meet our selection criteria (detailed here) and then they are manually reviewed. Each of URL is then screened by our publishing team for both theme and content. Because we know the food and recipe space, we know very quickly if we want them part of Gourmet Ads. Some ad networks have the reputation of taking any publisher that comes through the door, and unfortunately many do. We’re proud of our high rejection rate! - Tagging of Approved Sites
Apart from simply adding sites to Gourmet Ads – each site is tagged with keywords for additional trafficking. i.e sample tags include for “Above the Fold” and “Privacy Policy”. So if a advertiser only wanted to run with sites that have a Privacy Policy we can easily traffic this. - URL Restrictions
Apart from the manual process detailed above, our final check is via technology, ensuring that ads are only served on approved URLs and that our ad tags are not trafficked across other sites.
For more about the Gourmet Ads network, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.
President's Day Advertising
February 2, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
One of the first big retail shopping weekends of the year is President’s Day and most retailers offer significant savings off products. To achieve great high sales it’s essential that your President’s Day Advertising campaign includes a wide reaching digital aspect to drive consumers to both your online store or bricks and mortar stores.
For those that don’t know, Presidents Day was originally known as Washington’s Birthday in honor of the first US president, George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1732. President’s Day is a federal holiday in the United States and is generally celebrated on the third Monday of February.
Ideally your President’s Day Advertising should launch about 2 weeks prior to Presidents Day weekend on or about the 7th or 8th of February and should be wide reaching initially. Then about the 10th or 11th of February you should start running higher visibility units such as floating ads or interstitial advertising to gain attention, then rely on regular display throughout the network.
President Day Weekend is a great weekend for discounts, so make sure that your offers are exceptional. Remember your competitors will be in the market too undertaking President’s Day Advertising of their own. So have a clear offering in order to stand out.
So no matter if your advertising campaign has a national focus or local focus, Gourmet Ads can deliver your Presidents Day Advertising to your target demographic. For more information, Download our Media Kit or contact us for a proposal.
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.
Mr Household Grocery Buyer
August 4, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
This month Nielsen Consumer Insight published an article called “Role Reversal – Mr. Mom Goes Shopping”. The article is about how the household has changed and traditional roles have shifted with men now taking on a greater percentage of the household shopping than in the past. Today, almost one-third of men are now the principal shoppers in the home.
For any companies which advertise and sell products in supermarkets, there are some interesting statistics to be learnt. First off the percentage of female vs male grocery buyers is 61% female and 39% male. This is strikingly similar to our own sex demographic breakdown for the Gourmet Ads network which is 62% female and 38% male, indicating how inline our audience is with industry research.
Even though men have increasingly becoming the principal shoppers in the home, women continue to outspend men per trip across all retail channels. The article comments that this is due to women conducting more “planned” shopping trips than men.
So you’re probably thinking that men are stacking their shopping baskets full of beer, BBQ product and men’s health products like shaving creams and deodorants. However this is far from the case. Across the board, men are buying for the entire household and here is just a snapshot of what they are typically buying;
- Canned Seafood (61%)
- Refrigerated Juices, Drinks (61%)
- Prepared Food-Ready-to Serve Stew (59%)
- Herbal Package Tea (57%)
- Prepared Food-Ready-to Serve Lasagna (55%)
- Health Bars & Sticks (54%)
- Non-Sliced Refrigerated Lunch Meat (53%)
- Refrigerated Yogurt and Shakes (52%)
- Dishwasher Rinsing Aids (52%)
I think there are three main takeaways from this research.
1. Online Media Buying
When buying online media, ensure that you are buying a network which reaches the main household grocery buyer and has a similar percentage of women to men as indicated in the article (like Gourmet Ads network). If you were buying a women’s only advertising network you could be missing the male grocery buyer which is at least 35% of the market.
2. Creative Design
Like the first point in regards to media buying, you need to ensure your online advertising creative isn’t just targeted to women only, but yet appeals to both sexes. Otherwise you’ll be missing out on clicks from potential grocery buyers who are men.
3. Packaging & Branding
Once again with both women and men most likely to buy your products, it’s essential for the branding and packaging to appeal to both sexes and not just typically women.
Source:
http://en-us.nielsen.com/main/insights/consumer_insight/July_2009/role_reversal_mr_mom
Food Advertising Ideas
August 1, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
A while ago we wrote a blog on Wine Advertising Ideas which was aimed at smaller wineries, wine companies and pretty much anyone who was tasked with marketing and advertising wines. To date the blog is in our top ten blogs of all time. So now its time for a blog on Food Advertising Ideas, and like the wine blog this one is aimed at small to medium sized food businesses as well as multinationals which are yet to start advertising online.
So if you’re in do food marketing or food advertising this blog will give you some food advertising ideas which lay as the foundation for any advertising campaigns you plan to run.
- Brand Advertising
Mostly undertaken by large food companies is brand advertising. This is where the message is simply the brand and is created to engage the user and provide brand awareness so your product stands out on the shelf. Some of the key messages when advertising food brands is why your product is different, the places you can buy it and price if appropriate. - Product Based Campaigns
Say you’ve got a number of products that you retail. Well choose 12 products that you want to start advertising and every month focus on running a campaign for a different product. Keep in mind seasonality of the products, ie there is no point promoting winter soups in the middle of summer. The key here is to develop new creative every month. Additionally and from a media buying perspective clients that book 12 months of media with Gourmet Ads can receive significantly discounted CPM rates opposed to spot buys. - 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. Considered by some as a CRM campaign, once you’ve acquired a reasonable amount of email contacts, you can start emailing them directly. - Campaigns Advertising Competitions
This could be the under lying strategy for your Acquisition Campaign, but competitions are an excellent method of building brand awareness and building your email database. The key here is to offer a “great prize” opposed to just a prize. Consumers want to win something great. We’ve recently run a competition to have a celebrity chef cook in your house for the night which has attracted literally thousands of entires and isn’t really related to the brand being advertised. - Recipe Widgets
No matter what your food product, consumers love learning how to use your product in everyday cooking. So a widget featuring your recipes which use your food products can be very engaging to an audience which is looking for recipes. These simple rich media units are typically 300 x 250 island ad units and we traffic them to sites within our network. We can track engagements, displays, click throughs etc just like a regular ad unit. – Learn more about Recipe Widgets here. - Retailer Advertising Campaign
Telling your consumers where they can buy your products is very important, it’s the reason why you’ve probably got a long list of them on your website called “Where to Buy”. Have you ever thought about a co-promotion with the retailer to drive sales in-store? Your advertising could drive people to a landing page which told people of the offer or allowed them to print a coupon to get the discount. What ever the offer is, both you and the retailer benefit which is why you could share the advertising costs with them allowing you reach a great number of consumers. - TVC Campaigns Online
Taking your television commercial and simply repurposing for online can be a great way to further expand the reach of your campaign. Either formatted into a 300 x 250 ad unit, standalone video player or interstitial page, your video can make an impact. - Online Food Companies (Ecommerce)
Although many food companies sell their products through supermarkets, grocery stores of gourmet retailers, there are a great deal of food companies that only sell online. So for online food companies when it’s all about generating a sale online, we can provide a raft of solutions to generate sales. From wide reaching media to highly targeted Behavioural targeting campaigns, we can target your advertising to you most likely customer.
So no matter what the focus for your food advertising campaign, Gourmet Ads can deliver. For more Food Advertising Ideas, download our media kit or Request a Proposal from us.
Fall Media Planning
June 16, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
It’s mid June and we’re already having companies lock away their fall campaigns with Gourmet Ads. It’s typical to see this sort of six month forward planning with campaigns booked already pretty much focus on holiday periods such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. Just like snow falling, media planner and media buyers need to take a blanket approach with high share of voice to ensure their products gain the attention they desire online. With this in mind, it’s key to lock it in as soon as possible.
Fall is so important to many food and wine companies. Not only are the holiday periods key, but we find that traffic generally increases to our sites during the fall. There are a variety of reasons for why we see this trend of increased traffic (I believe the main reason is that cold weather contributes with more people generally staying in) during the fall period. Take a look at the graph below from Google Trends for the keyword search “recipes”. Towards the end of each year take a look at the common annual trends for people searching “recipes”. Given that the majority of sites in the Gourmet Ads network feature recipes we also see this trend rather consistently.
Media planners and media buyers should look at starting campaigns in early September and October, then mid November vamping it up to high share of voice. Focusing on key dates around Thanksgiving, then Black Friday, the last few days of online Christmas spending and then Christmas spending.
We’ve previously write blogs on Thanksgiving Advertising and Christmas Advertising which both focus on each of these topics. Both blogs give you ideas on timing and what can be done in the lead up to both thanksgiving and Christmas.
So although we’ve just started the US summer, planning your advertising campaigns at the end of the year is something that should be happening now. Our team would be happy to develop a Digital Media Plan for your consideration, to do this, simply visit Request a Proposal. Or if you’re simply looking at all the opportunities in the market, then start by downloading our media kit.
Not Just Clicks
June 5, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Earlier this week I stumbled over a study from iProspect.com which looked at the behavior of US internet users when visiting a website supported by advertising. The study surveyed Internet users to find out what actions they took when viewing a display ad on an ad-supported Website, 31% said they clicked on the ad.
In addition, 27% reported that they did an online search for the product, brand or company; something that we’ve believed for sometime. We’ve seen a tonne of research indicating this and I think we’ll write a dedicated blog about it in the future.
21% typed the company Web address in their browser. This was also rather obvious to us and is definitely the reason why you should have a naturally sounding domain name like www.companyname.com or www.brandname.com even if you simply redirect it back through to the product page on the company website. You could be missing out on traffic that’s looking for you. Make it easier!
Finally, and I cant really understand why, but 9% sought additional information using social media tools. It could be that the’ve looked at the product website and are looking for reviews, comments etc ?
So the conclusion of the study is that a click is only one measure of a display ad’s effectiveness. The by line of the report was “Display ads do more than look pretty” and as you can see this is very much the case. In order to measure the total value of a campaign it means you now need to be measuring all the online assets of your company or brand. For website metrics, you could use something like Google Analytics or Webtrends for visitors, tracking searches and domain name typing. Then on the social side you’ll need a tool to measure social side.
Source : www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007090
Beyond the Banner
June 3, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 2 Comments
Nearly every RFP (request for proposal) we’ve seen for digital advertising this year has mentioned the phrase “Beyond the Banner” or some sort of related comment like “we’re looking for something further than just regular display advertising”. Why? Because advertisers (and advertising agencies) know that these sorts of campaigns build branding and driving purchase intent.
Recent increases in bandwidth as well as technology developments in Flash and Silverlight have meant that there is no excuse for not using rich media as a standard inclusion for the every campaign. Now advertisers can use creative assets such as streaming video to get the message across. All of a sudden internet looks far more attractive than compared to TV. For the first time advertisers can run a video advertisement (for longer than 30 seconds) like that would have on TV and then engage with them right then and there. Have them go to your website, purchase a product, signup for a newsletter, follow them on Twitter.
So what options does Gourmet Ads typically include on a digital media plan for clients? Each and every digital media plan is different. We’ll take a look at the target audience, how they want to communicate with the client and the ultimate aim for the campaign. But broadly these are some for the Beyond the Banner activity we would recommend to a client;
- Over the Page
- Site Sponsorship
- Viral Video Campaign
- Expanding video ad units
- Push Down Expandables
Gourmet Ads isn’t a creative house, but providing you can supply us with your existing creative (even offline creative) we will have them redeveloped into rich media for your Beyond the Banner campaign. We work with leading developers in the US to develop all the assets for your campaign.
Finally, apart from the Beyond the Banner elements, we always include regular display on our digital media plans. ie 728 x 90 (leaderboard), 300 x250 (MREC or Island) and 160 x600 (skyscrapers). This is because as good as the rich media beyond the banner activity is, the display ads which are closely surrounding them or viewed after the fact get the clicks. Think of beyond the banner as informing and entertaining them and display which gains the engagement and fulfillment.
So if you’re looking to reach a unique audience of food and wine consumers using Beyond the Banner creative or just want to learn more about what can be done online, then download our media kit or request a proposal from our team.
Advertising your Twitter Page
May 22, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Twitter is starting to gain a great deal of attention in main stream media in recent times and it reminds me of when Facebook initially started to gain a wider audience base about 2 years ago. At that time it was the early adopters in your network of friends that started to tip their toe in, with many still skeptical of the platform or concerned about privacy. I am seeing that same network of friends
starting to move to Twitter.
I think one of the reasons why we’ve seen a recent growth in Twitter is the use by both celebrities and companies who have already embraced the platform and having an actual two way discussion with fans or uses of their products. Something that till now has been hard for brands to do. Over at my personal site, I’ve created a list of Celebrity Chefs on Twitter.
So how does your brand engage with consumers on Twitter and gain an audience of a few hundred thousand followers overnight?
Gourmet Ads has been on Twitter for a while now (follow us @gourmetads), and we use the platform to talk with advertising agencies, marketing managers, publishers and anyone associated with our business around the globe. We publish regular content into Twitter each day as well as have conversations with clients and publishers regularly. So we have something that our audience actually wants to engage and actively discuss or even just read and observe.
Apart from people simply adding us via Twitter, we’ve grown our audience base through running targeted ads through the Gourmet Ads network. This is something that you can do its very cost effective compared to the some of the wild over thought strategies that you read or hear about. There is no point randomly adding people who are not relevant to your brand. If you are food brand and your product is only in New York State, Gourmet Ads can run a campaign that is targeted towards people that live in New York State who are more likely to engage with your brand than not. If you are winery in Napa Valley with national distribution, then it makes sense to just run your campaign in America.
Your campaign to drive people to your food or wine Twitter page could be done two ways. You could either drive them simply to your page on Twitter. However I believe that’s a very immature way of doing it because you assume that everyone who clicks on the ad will know;
a) what twitter is
b) what they have to do.
I would recommend sending the users to a page on your website and educate them about Twitter. This page could be about why your brand has decided to embrace Twitter and why they can benefit from following your brand online. I saw a boutique beer brand in Australia run a weekly competition only open to people following their brand on Twitter. Very clever.
If you’d like to look at increasing your reach using Twitter, then Gourmet Ads can help build your audience. Request a Proposal from us and we’ll develop a Digital Media Plan that targets your audience and helps drive engagement and conversation with your consumers.
