To ensure it remains ahead in the food space, Taste is investing in video and voice activation but says the key behind it's success remains its “goldmine” of data.
Speaking to AdNews, News Corp lifestyle director Fiona Nilsson said the popularity of the Taste.com.au website is partly due to foodie culture, which has exploded across Instagram feeds. According to Nilsson, 70% of Australians are engaged with food media and two out of three consider themselves a “foodie”.
“There is a huge demand for food media content in all forms and it continues to grow,” she said.
Still, Taste has had to put a lot of muscle into its brand to remain at the top and attributes its investment in data to its ongoing success, taking the title of Food Magazine Brand of the Year at the Australian Magazine Awards.
Taste generates more than 70 million data points a day with all of its recipes parsed and tagged down to ingredient level.
“We use all of our insights across our digital platforms and overlay it with the latest google trends to create content that is highly relevant.”
This creates what Nilsson refers to as “smart content” that runs across the Taste “ecosystem” to give users a seamless brand experience.
“It's the largest platform ecosystem, having an audience of 5.6 million. We can't really look at single platform offering in isolation anymore. We look at our brands in terms of building ecosystems and off the back of that the Taste eco-system now has over 1.3 million loyal members who rely on the brand for inspiration everyday.”
Data offering
To further capitalise on the daya it's captured Taste started releasing its quarterly trends, Trend Forecasts, to give advertisers better insight into the market.
“We have this incredible data that we take, we mine it and then overlay key insights with the foresight of our editors - our food experts basically,” she said.
Trends are fed to advertisers three to six months ahead of season.
“Advertisers are looking constantly for insight from data to help make decisions not just around media and marketing, but also product development. We're really lucky to be sitting on this goldmine of data. It's like we have this gigantic live focus group across our Taste network in having such a large audience.”
Fiona Nilsson
Video and voice technology
As part of Taste's ecosystem it's ramping up its video offering and investing more in voice activation, with video streaming up nearly 500% year on year.
Nilsson said video now makes up a significant portion of its budget as advertisers have a significant demand for it. Video offerings include Aisle Watch, Taste Tester Live and the newly launched Taste TV.
“In the last 18 months we've made video a really significant part of our strategy. We are now generating a combined video-stream views of seven million with four million of that coming from social media.”
Most of its video content is created in-house including videos for Taste TV, which is a new series of scheduled programmes and bespoke videos that offer integration opportunities.
“This is a major point of difference because it means our advertisers can really tap into this incredible expertise. Taste TV has proved incredibly popular, we're selling at least one package every week, which is incredible for something we just launched to market in the last couple of months.”
As well as video, Taste is also leading the charge in voice activation. Nilsson said 50% of recipe searches will be voiced activated by 2020 through partnerships with Google Home, Alexa and Amazon.
Taste also recently launched its app with voice integration and saw total downloads increase nearly 200% month on month.
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