FIGARODIGITAL.CO.UK
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
Multimedia publishers Great British Chefs have enjoyed huge success with their recipe apps since launching in 2011. In an in-depth interview, CEO Ollie Lloyd tracks the brand’s story so far, discusses the role of content and tells us why he isn’t ashamed of food porn
If the content you’re creating isn’t best in class,” says
Ollie Lloyd, CEO at Great British Chefs, “there’s no point doing it. We passionately believe that content is what really connects with people. Even if you only do one thing, be clear about who you are and do that one thing right.” As the driving force behind one of the
UK’s most successful online food publishers, Lloyd’s well placed to assess the sorts of strategies reaping rewards for digital brands. A committed foodie and a trained marketer who cut his teeth at Unilever – where he rechristened Jif as Cif – Great British Chefs is less than three years old but the company’s apps have become regular fixtures in critics’ ‘best of’ lists and, says Lloyd, in just nine months the company amassed a bigger following on Facebook than Channel 4 Food, Delia, Delicious magazine and The Great British Bake Off combined. So what’s been the thinking behind this uniquely tasty proposition? “Originally,” he says, “I was challenged
by a couple of entrepreneurs to look at the food space. We felt that a lot of the big platforms were very monolithic. You had Jamie, Delia, Nigella and so on, but there was no place you could get a broad, rich story around a real variety of culinary stars. We looked hard at the whole space and the fact that there are 30 million recipe searches a month, and felt that what we really wanted to do was ‘own’ expertise. And if you want to own expertise you need to work with the greatest chefs in the UK. So that’s when Great British Chefs was born, and we started with apps and social media. The first iPad/iPhone app was launched in July 2011. It picked up a lot of buzz, won a Silver Lovie and was featured in Apple’s TV commercial. From there we very
quickly began to build a social media following. It was only then that we began to expand into a much bigger website and started to work with brand partners.” Now the company works with 80 chefs
across the UK, among them Marcus Wareing and Paul Heathcote. The brand partners range from Kikkoman Soy Sauce to Tesco and there’s a projected move into further relationships with financial services and travel organisations. How, then, does Lloyd view the role of specific digital channels in nurturing audience engagement and establishing the company’s credentials? “If you step back and look at the big
food businesses – BBC Good Food, Delicious magazine – they’re print publications and they’re asking themselves, ‘what should we do online?’ We start from the position of being a digital brand, so we’re asking ‘how do we engage our consumer base online?’”
T 54 issue 17 may 2013
he answer to that, says Lloyd, lies in understanding the role of content. “Take video. We have over 150 HD instructional videos – recipes and chef videos that help people cook. Those
are layered into our content, they also live on Vimeo, on YouTube, and we have a strategic partnership with the Guardian where we publish a video every week.
“With email, our database grows at about five thousand subscribers a month. We have a very clear strategy whereby we send out competitions in partnership with brands like Kenwood. On a Saturday morning we send out recipes for the weekend. We’re sending out two to three emails for our site each week and we get fantastic open rates and traffic as a result.”
Underpinning much of this is social media activity. So is Facebook now the natural home for brands like Great British Chefs? “Actually,” says Lloyd, “I think that at
ARTICLE JON FORTGANG
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