Kitchen Aid is cooking up a storm on FoodNetwork.ca.
The iconic kitchen appliance brand has launched a first for both itself and the Canwest channel’s website: an online-only branded show called Cooking Moments. Featuring ‘Kitchen Aid Celebrity Chefs,’ each six- to nine-minute webisode follows one of the chefs as they create a recipe using a Kitchen Aid appliance. Underneath the video player are the recipe details, so the viewer can try it at home.
Kitchen Aid already had a comprehensive marketing plan in place, but felt like they could push the boundaries of their media strategy even further, Kim Astley, brand manager, Kitchen Aid, tells MiC.
‘We had all the traditional marketing elements covered, and felt like there was an opportunity to take our traditional online pre-roll media buy and make those dollars work a little bit harder for us,’ Astley explains. ‘I liked the idea of having a couple of big ideas that consumers can’t miss. So we challenged [the brand’s MAOR] MediaCom to go back and think about the brand – Kitchen Aid is a brand for those who love to cook, they’re passionate about food, let’s find a property or an entity that owns that realm and let’s partner with them.’
The media agency’s Toronto office returned with the Cooking Moments idea – the logo was created by Publicis – and a 17-week cross-platform promotional package to support it. Food Network Canada viewers will see promotional tags on-air, driving them to FoodNetwork.ca to see the webisodes, and a digital buy across Canwest’s entire online portfolio will do the same. A FoodNetwork.ca-only digital buy will span seven months. Kitchen Aid is also sponsoring the 2010 seasonal cooking guides produced by the Food Network, featuring editorial integrations ‘tied to product innovation that we have coming down the pipeline,’ Astley explains. Kitchen Aid is also running a Cooking Moments-style TV campaign across conventional and specialty TV, featuring vignettes of families cooking with Kitchen Aid products.
Kitchen Aid’s target psychographic is avid foodies and at-home chefs and so the Food Network website was the perfect place to reach them, because it’s a place they already go, she says. The goal was to entice viewers to watch with a short-form format instead of the traditional 30-minute format of TV, and to integrate the products in way that was natural to the viewer, and not blatantly promotional: ‘We did want it to be a legitimate show where viewers are learning to cook something,’ Astley quips. ‘We didn’t want to beat them over the head with product integration.’
There are two shows up on the Food Network site right now, and future episodes will be rolled out in twos as well. Right now, there are two scheduled for fall, and two more for winter. If all goes well, Astley says, they’d like to continue with the program, and possibly bring even more chefs on board. Current celebrity chefs include longtime Kitchen Aid partners Michael and Anna Olson, Rose Reisman and BBQ star Rob Rainford.
