Taste.com.au and BuzzFeed have long being hailed the kings of cooking content, but new contenders are now keen to take a slice of the pie.
In the four months since 9Kitchen was launched, it has secured advertisers Aldi and Dyson, and brought on former Australian Women’s Weekly editor Helen McCabe to head the lifestyle arm of Nine.com.au.
9Kitchen editor Jane de Graaff tells AdNews food was previously a category overlooked by Nine, but now it is moving full steam ahead to compete with established players in the market.
“It was a space that had been neglected but it obviously gets huge traction – everyone wants it, from advertisers to audiences,” de Graaff says.
In the past six months, publishers have dialled up their investment on food. News Corp launched a dedicated food network, Seven West Media unveiled Foodiful, Bauer's Gourmet Traveller released multicultural editions and BuzzFeed opened Tasty to Australian advertisers.
“Taste.com.au is our number one competitor but we aren’t frightened by other platforms out there. It’s validation that it’s a great place to play in. I don’t see it as a competition, rather hyper awareness of the category,” de Graaff says.
De Graaff was speaking to AdNews on the increasing appetite for food content for our feature 'A Feast of Food Content'. You can read the article by subscribing here.
It’s not just publishers chasing the tail of the food porn phenomenon; brands are getting in on the act, too.
Food lends itself naturally to content and this provides a huge opportunity to FMCG food-related marketing.
Nine digital sales director Ben Gunn says 9Kitchen is looking at a branded series around themes and other ways of executing branded content. Another major focus for Nine and its recently launched mobile ad formats is to measure how the content drives in-store sales for partners.
For one of its first branded content partners, 9Kitchen has teamed up with Fitbit and Horticulture Australia across various recipes.
Fitbit branded content is being supported by display advertising
“Celebrity chefs bring the entertainment value to our content, but our focus is to create recipes that are easy to do at home. For a while, the food landscape became a little unreachable so we want our content to be accessible,” de Graaff says.
A prominent part of 9Kitchen’s strategy will be to leverage video content – a content area becoming increasingly important to publishers globally. It will also draw inspiration from its network of TV programs for editorial content, with Nine set to launch a new TV food format in 2017.
While other publishers have been busy emulating BuzzFeed’s popular Tasty videos, 9Kitchen will take a different approach to video content.
“Rather than shooting impersonal videos of hands and cutting out the face of people, we are going into kitchens and featuring chefs,” de Graaff says.
Recently, Nine has used The Block host Scott Cam for a video on kitchen renovation tips. Another video, tapping into the internet sensation Frosé, featured a chef from O Bar and Dining and has racked up nearly 40,000 viewers in five days.
Gunn says video will be 9Kitchen’s “secret sauce”: “Some of our competitors lead in the written word, but we excel in video so there’s an opportunity for us to lead in this space.
"A lot of food publishing has been building on what has already been popular in the broadcast space, which puts Nine in a good position because we know how to do it right,” he says.
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