Digital Food and Drink Conference
As you would expect from the leading foodservice digital agency, much of our time is spent ensuring we are abreast of the latest trends in our industry. And so it was that I found myself bound for this year’s Digital Food and Drink Conference held at America Square in London.
With a truly impressive selection of speakers I was looking forward to the thrust and parry of debate as retailer and brand alike took to the stage to put forward their presentations and debate how each can help one and other deliver success in the digital space.
For those of you not lucky enough to have attended, here are my top 10 take outs from the day’s speakers. Ready? Right, here goes.
1) Kate Douglas from Twitter talked about their exciting new products – namely Amplify, Moments and Niche. Want to keep up to speed on social? Go and read up on those.
2) ASDA noted that ‘incentivised’ emails outperformed Supplier Branded emails by a factor of 30%. Looks like money off or a giveaway still reigns supreme.
3) Steve Millard of Burton’s Biscuits revealed that the value of online sales in food is set to double by 2020 – those not exploiting digital are missing out – big time.
4) A straw poll of attendees showed zero plans for adoption of iBeacon technology – the need for an app, bluetooth enabled, lack of signal in store all seems too high a barrier.
5) Jamie Nascimento from Orangina spoke of his ‘comma, not full stop’ approach – always think of the next step you wish a consumer to make to continue their marketing journey.
6) Gordon Morrin of Kerry Foods shared the success of Sausage and Chip – his Christmas campaign, and how emotional marketing drove great results for Richmond sausages.
7) Jamie from Orangina talked of ‘thumb-stopping’ video – quick, video edits from a longer cut without audio that encourage mobile users to stop in their scrolling and take note.
8) Dan Jeffreys from Bettys / Taylors of Harrogate showed the room his case study for how a viral video of their £250.00 Easter Egg drove online chatter and ultimately sales uplift. Seems like a good stunt, well executed is still a very powerful way of getting virtual tongues wagging.
9) Nick Bamber of Asda and Joe Comiskey of Unilever spoke of the power of customer reviews online, and how they even power shopper behaviour in store as well as via the e-commerce experience.
10) On average we unlock our phones 150 times a day, Twitter sends 6000 tweets per second, 1 in 5 of us follow a food brand on Twitter, we tweet more about #meat than #chocolate, and Greek food is fastest growing food trend on Twitter. Enough stats for one day? Thought so.
So an all-round great event, and a fascinating collection of speakers from the world of foodservice digital. Thanks to Global Insight Conferences for a great event and for providing a platform for us digital foodies to congregate and thrash out the hot topics. Events as thoughtfully curated as this are hard to come by in my experience. We’re looking forward to next year’s event already!
Jellybean Creative is a leading foodservice digital agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, foodservice marketing, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
Jellybean Christmas Party 2015
Never satisfied by doing anything that might be conventional or obvious, our 2015 Christmas party took place in 2016. January 2016 to be precise.
We eschewed the typical party hats, turkey and crackers and instead decided that as die-hard foodies we ought to make our evening one of culinary adventure and discovery. With that in mind, we boarded the train and headed for Covent Garden and the little corner that after dark offers hungry Londoners a slice of Catalonia.
Barrafina on Adelaide Street ushered us downstairs to their private dining room which is lined on all sides with dusty bottles of Spanish wine, sherry and ports. To help us thaw out we were poured a schooner of Manzanilla upon arrival, and this dangerous precedent continued for an hour or so as the kitchen staff peered through the door at the worrying numbers of hungrey people they were soon required to feed.
As the sherry worked its magic we lined up the first playlist of the evenining, a mix of ‘Hispanic, Funk, Soul and Dub’, possibily the only people on planet earth to be pairing those styles at that time. As the soundscapes of Barcelona and Kingston Town blended, we were then presented with a blur of starters – from chilli scallops, roasted peppers, soft shell crab, roasted artichokes and many many more – all of which were picked clean within minutes of reaching the table.
And if the free-flowing alcohol wasn’t enough to encourage embarrassment amongst us all, then the party games were sure to do that. If it wasn’t a dance off competition, it was picking up Maltesers through a straw – I think there was a drawing competition also, but to be honest the evening is something of a blur to me at this point. I know there was laughter, excellent tunes (can you tell it was me that did the playlist?) and a lot of very fine food.
So, some knowledge. Where do we get ‘tapas’ from? Well I’m glad you asked. Because I’ve literally just looked it up on Wikipedia. Tapas comes from the Spanish word ‘tapa’ meaning ‘cover’ or ‘lid’ – this was because in times gone by, customers in Spanish ‘bodegas’ would ‘cover’ their glasses of sherry with chorizo or bread to prevent those pesky fruit flies from getting at the good stuff.
So now you know. Thank you Barrafina for some very fine lids.
Jellybean Creative is a leading foodservice pr agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, food service marketing, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables
We’re not afraid to highlight other people’s great work here at Jellybean. Especially when it comes to great work that addresses serious issues in the food and drink industry we love so much – here’s a great one from Intermarche in France.
Currently part of the ‘Designs of the Year 2015’ exhibit at our very own Design Museum in London, this campaign titled ‘Inglorious Fruit and Vegetables’ tackles the problem we face globally where 300 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables are thrown away every year because they are unusual looking.
As 2014 was the International Year Against Food Waste, Intermarche made the decision to tack onto the back of this activity and address the issue head on.
Stars of the campaign were the ‘Grotesque Apple’, the ‘Ridiculous Potato’, the ‘Hideous Orange’, the ‘Failed Lemon’, the ‘Disfigured Eggplant’, the ‘Ugly Carrot’ and the ‘Unfortunate Clementine’.
The pay off to all of this was that now it’s even easier to eat your five a day as these fruit and vegetables are as good as ‘calibrated’ fruit and vegetables, only these ‘inglorious’ ones are 30% cheaper. So a great PR message, and a saving for customers. Win Win.
To counter any concerns from consumers that these inglorious products were inferior in terms of flavour, Intermarche produced a range of ‘inglorious’ soups and juices which they sampled in store – if you’re chopping, souping, juicing or dicing these fruits and vegetables, what does it matter how they look when you buy them?
The results? An overall store traffic increase of 24% with a reach of 21 million people on social media after one month.
The recipe for success here as we see it? Well, it seemed like a perfect combination of:
- Allying your work to a great piece of PR activity which has real penetration as well as a truly worthy cause
- Great creative with a sense of humour
- Boots on the ground in stores to sample the fruits and vegetables and to answer questions
- Traditional PR
- Social Media
Jellybean Creative is a leading foodservice marketing agency and communications agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, food and drink pr, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
Landing Pages
More than ever, marketers are turning to the benefits of landing pages as a way to deliver real inbound results in their marketing campaigns.
But what exactly are landing pages, and how can you add them into your marketing mix?
Good questions.
Landing pages are usually single webpages hosted on the internet that are designed as landing pages for a specific push campaign, be it an e-marketing campaign, social campaign, or direct mail campaign. These landing pages, very often have data capture forms embedded in them and are designed to ‘convert’ or ‘qualify’ the visitor in the eyes of the business owner, expressing their interest in the product or service.
So far, so straightforward. So what is all the fuss about?
Well, in time-honoured fashion, here are the bullet-points.
1 EFFECTIVE. It’s been proven, across a great many markets that your conversion rate for a campaign is significantly improved if the user is taken through to a dedicated landing page that matches both the design of the campaign, but also the intention of the campaign. So rather than design a unique look and feel for an email and then take users through to a generic contact page on your website, match the look and feel of the email across the landing page.
2 QUICK. Typically the production time for an engaging landing page is far quicker than if you had to produce something within a corporate website.
3 FLEXIBLE. Prototyping stand-alone landing pages allows you design freedom as you are not tethered to the corporate website’s stylesheets and templates. Starting from scratch, or from a set of ready-made themes allows you to exercise creative freedom.
4 SALES ORIENTATED. Rather than focus on open rates, opportunities to see or click through rates, you are focusing your efforts on converting or qualifying recipients to receive follow-up information.
5. LOWER CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COSTS. Each improvement you make to your landing pages lowers your customer acquisition costs.
6. MEASURABLE. Both via Google Analytics, form submissions and form success rate you can easily measure the success of your landing pages.
Hopefully that goes some way to highlighting why landing pages are taking the marketing world by storm.
Get in touch and start to see the benefits stack up for your business.
Jellybean Creative is a leading food and drink pr agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, foodservice marketing, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
Social Media in Foodservice – as featured in QuickBite Magazine
Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Instagram, LinkedIn…the list goes on. Sometimes it feels as if there is a new social media channel to consider every six months. Is it for me? How does it work? Will I be left behind if I decide it’s just one channel too many?
We feel your pain. Hopefully this bite-sized review will help you decide.
Each successful social media channel has a key distinguishing feature that makes them unique, and which they hope will gain them their following.
Here’s our list of the primary social media channels, what makes them unique, and what benefit you might gain from them.
A great site for sending short updates to your following, and a simple way to gain a following. Tweets are quick to compose and quick to read resulting in the huge growth in uptake in recent years. #hashtags mean you can easily join larger conversations and the SEO benefits of being part of these conversations are growing.
The ‘like’ button on Facebook is the easiest way to allow your brand to be promoted to prospects, and a successful company page invests in publishing content of real value to your audience, increasing your chances of a ‘thumbs up’ – play to the strengths of the platform building your reach through joining groups.
Make the most of a workforce who very possibly already have a presence and connections Create a business page for staff to follow, join relevant groups on LinkedIn and ensure that your services are updated so that premium members who use LinkedIn to find suppliers, find you.
Is your product or service a visual one. Are you either a premium product or brand that is shown off best in beautiful photographs? Do you find your competitors or conversations around your product or service via hashtag searches on Instagram? If so, this might well be for you.
Similar to Instagram in some senses but built around ‘Pins’ which are links back to a webpage containing the original content. This has real benefits in terms of SEO and also in driving leads back to your website. Still a significantly female audience, but if that’s what you’re after it might be for you.
Google +
If the majority of your new business leads are from search traffic then Google + might just be the platform for you. Due to it’s integration with the search engine giant, it is an easy SEO win to link your Google + account with your website.
As with any content marketing online, be it social or otherwise, we would always encourage businesses to think from the user back, rather than brand forward.
Find out which social media channels your audience use and what they use them for. Then decide what content you can easily develop that has real value to the end user; be it an online tool, white paper or video.
Broadcast this on social media and your audience will share the content for you, amplifying your business’ reach.
Jellybean Creative is a leading social media foodservice agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, foodservice marketing, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
Jellybean Support the Weir Archer Academy
Last Friday found Susan and I guests at a glittering fund-raiser for the Weir Archer Academy, held at the magnificent and mighty Great Fosters in Egham.
Little prepares you for the sight of Great Fosters in Egham, and arriving at night to see the exterior illuminated with flame only makes it more dramatic.
Built in 1550 amidst 50 acres of carefully clipped gardens and lawn, this grand old pile of bricks and in particular its tithe barn was our venue for the evening.
The Weir Archer Academy was set up by now legendary Paralympian David Weir CBE and his trainer Jenny Archer. The Academy provides athlete and coaching support and expertise across all levels and abilities including working with Schools in South London, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire; working with clubs and coaches from the South East and providing access to the Academy for international development for under resourced counties.
After witnessing first hand the paucity of British Paralympic athletes at the Beijing Games when compared with other nations, Weir felt that the sport was fighting for its very survival in Britain. The Weir Archer Academy seeks to nurture the very best athletes and in doing so generate the Paralympians of the future.
As a supporter of the charity, Jellybean donated both design work in the production of much of the printed material on the night, but also in donating an internship to be auctioned off in the silent auction.
And so on the night we were extremely fortunate that both David and Jenny were able to join us, as well as a great number of Academy athletes shortly to race in the marathon.
Festivities kicked off with a champagne reception to the strains of ‘Sweetheart Swing’, a female duo channelling the forces-era close vocal harmonies of The Andrews Sisters.
Suitably refreshed we decamped to the vast tithe barn and to our table for a delicious three course meal of salmon terrine, followed by tender lamb with mint sauce and lastly a trio of chocolate mousse, salted caramel cream and salted caramel ice cream.
Speeches from David followed by a video presentation set out the amazing work the Academy does and what an enormous difference it brings to the lives of children living with disability.
Next came the main business of the evening – raising some much needed money from the guests via the auction – expertly helmed by the effervescent and energetic Joe Gallagher, things got off to a great start. Some amazing lots were generously donated including a ‘money-can’t-buy’ VIP package for Bestival including backstage passes as well as a highly prized Victoria Beckham clutch bag.
Once the final lot had been auctioned, duties fell to the band, Fully Funktional, who kicked off the dancing – right away vocalists, guitarists and even the trombone player were amongst the audience pulling people up onto the dance floor.
As we speak the total raised is already over £20,000.00 – a magnificent sum which will transform the lives of so deserving children and young adults.
Enormous thanks go to all involved in the production of the event and the hospitality on the night, but special thanks go to Tania and Joe Gallagher whose idea for the event and organisation in every area was carried out with determination, dedication and above all else a smile.
For more information on the vital work that the Weir Archer Academy carries out, please visit the website here.
Jellybean Creative is a leading social media foodservice agency. We help top brands with foodservice pr, foodservice marketing, digital and design. If you feel we could help you with your marcomms, strategy, public relations, creative or digital then drop us a line today.
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