Food Ingredients
Matching your advertising expenditures to your target’s media consumption habits
It’s that time of year… everyone’s planning their budgets for 2010. We all hope and pray that the recession will be over by then, but in the meantime most organizations are lean and mean. Just today eMarketer reported that in order to improve overall marketing effectiveness, 70% of marketers are moving budget from traditional to digital media.
So is it time for you to create a high impact online marketing program? You know that your targets are online, but where do I start?
Two primary ways come to mind – targeted media buys and search marketing.
Localvores, family farms and the Top Chef Master
By now, all of us Top Chef addicts (the Bravo TV series) know that Rick Bayless of Topolobamp![158633995_6308f084a5_t[1]](http://www.blog.cbdmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/158633995_6308f084a5_t1.jpg)
o and Frontera Grill fame is the new Top Chef Master. By beating out the worthy competition, Bayless won $100,000 for the Frontera Farmer Foundation, which supports small, sustainable farms in the Midwest. Started by Bayless and his partner and wife Deann, the Foundation provides modest capital grants which can leapfrog a small farm to profitability. Doing so adds to the vitality and viabilty of the local food scene, but there’s a greater good. As he so aptly put on the Foundation’s website: “Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community’s vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture.” Everyone who champions sustainability owes Rick Bayless a “Bravo” – not just for winning what looked like a pretty intense competition–but for bringing network attention to this worthy cause.
The carbon footprint in your wine
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Newsweek reports that if you’re a New Yorker, you leave a much smaller carbon footprint drinking a French wine shipped by sea over the Atlantic (2.93 pounds of carbon per bottle) than you would drinking a Napa vintage that was air shipped or trucked in (7.05 pounds per bottle). Interesting factoid, and a good reminder that the method of transportation matters as much as the distance when calculating carbon. Shipping by sea generates less than half the emissions associated with planes and tractor-trailers. Of course, this is not a problem when you drink locally-made beverages. Here in Chicago, we love our beer. CBDers have chimed in with our favorite Chi-town brews: Goose Island’s 312 and Matilda , Half Acre and Two Brothers. Though not a beer, my personal favorites are the amazingly delicious organic liqueurs made by Koval, a boutique distillery in the heart of the city. Chime in with your local favorites.
You are just sooooo demanding!
We are all getting used to the mind-set of “I want what I want and I want it now”. Those techy companies who taught us to be so demanding are reaping great rewards … think Netflix, iTunes, Gamefly. We knew that it would only be a matter of time for On-Demand to hit the food industry in a meaningful way.
Sure, there was Burger King’s old “have it your way” … really, with or without pickles? … and the crazies at Starbucks with their insanely complicated orders for coffee. But all that really does is slow down a line and make someone (like me) who simply wants a cup of coffee grow increasingly impatient and take our business elsewhere.
Watch this, eat that
Certainly there is no shortage of reasons, blame, whatever associated with skyrocketing obesity rates in America. We’ve become a slovenly society, food is over-processed and cheap and the recession has us smothered in comfort food. The old TV excuse (“the advertising made me want it”) seems almost quaint. Yet …
Obesity, Longevity and the American Way
Much has been made of the University of Wisconsin study on calorie restriction and longevity. You know, the one where they’ve allowed one group of rhesus monkeys to eat whatever they want and fed a second group a diet of 30 percent fewer calories than “normal.” With an average life expectancy of 27, the “eat whatever” group is dying off faster—37 percent have died in ways judged to be age related—than the restricted group, where only 13 percent have died. Impressive, but I did enjoy Roger Cohen’s opinion piece in The New York Times regarding the happiness quotients of the two sets of monkeys as viewed through observation of Canto (dieting) and Owen (eating with abandon). Canto: anxious, sunken eyes, features pinched. Owen: laid back, eyes twinkling, a wry smile.
