You are what you eat – how marketers can use recipes to target consumers
For the first time, advertisers are now able to leverage millions of recipe data points to reach the perfect customer. News Corp Australia’s Fiona Nilsson explains why the breakthrough is such an advantage.
On the surface, the recipe pages of News Corp Australia’s food brands – Taste, delicious, Best Recipes and Kidspot Kitchen – are a simple collection of ingredients and instructions. But in 2019, they’re now also data-driven powerhouses, with millions of unique data points for marketers to tap into. Everything from meal occasion to difficulty level and micro-nutrient data has been analysed, as well as all that food and drink.
At News Corp’s Come Together event, delegates learned about Food Connect in an interactive dining room
The intention of doing this was twofold: firstly, to help improve the user experience for consumers searching for inspiration; and secondly, to provide even more detailed targeting opportunities for advertisers. “As far as we know,” says Fiona Nilsson, News Corp Australia’s lifestyle director, “we’re the only ones who have attempted this on such a scale.”
It was certainly a labour of love. The Food Corp team had to parse out each ingredient and register it as its own data point, which was followed by tagging each recipe right down to an ingredient level. “The data not only allows us to create targeted content solutions for advertisers but to add personalisation for consumers,” says Nilsson.
Each month, more than 16 million Australians consume news and information across our suite of digital and print brands – more than any other media group in Australia.
So now the food/recipe pages are now also going to have sponsored editorial, as well as Motoring, Travel, Finance and Health. I’ll just collect my Coles and Wollies free mags, at least they don’t pretend to be unbiased and I am not paying a cover price for editorial disguised as advertorial.