The popularity of cooking videos on social media has not only given rise to some unlikely food trends (pickle juice anyone?), but is reshaping the way food websites think about producing and distributing content. Earlier this year, Immediate, the publishing group that owns Good Food, Radio Times and BBC Gardeners’ World, opened the Good Food Test Kitchen, a new studio space for testing (and tasting) recipes, and producing video content for the publisher’s website and social channels.
The launch formed a key part of Immediate’s video strategy, led by former TikTok strategist Paul Doyle, who joined the company in 2022, and now serves as Director of Video Strategy & Delivery. Prior to his appointment, the company’s video output was “negligible”, but since the strategy was implemented the company has seen significant gains in video views (+152 percent) and video revenues (+60 percent). Doyle tells VideoWeek the group is looking to increase not only video literacy at the business, but video fluency.
“We’re trying to bake video into the Good Food brand as much as possible – no pun intended,” says Doyle. “We’re doing a huge amount of upskilling of the content teams and bringing in the infrastructure around video, from dedicated editors to media asset management tools. That way we can scale video to make it a bigger experience, because it’s increasingly what advertisers want, and what all our audiences want. We’ve done studies year on year where we’re seeing a preference for video over text-based content.”
Best of both
The new studio space helps Immediate meet that appetite for video, enabling the business to use a multi-camera setup to produce more of the “food entertainment” content that is popular on YouTube, such as challenges and head-to-heads between different chefs. Good Food can also serve up livestreams from the kitchen studio, for example on Pancake Day (“the biggest day in Good Food land”), alongside recipe and tutorial videos that live on the website and app.
Meanwhile the company can produce short-form content for TikTok and Instagram, including quick recipe hacks, advice videos and content that leans into viral food trends, such as last year’s craze for cucumber salad. The social channels are also used to drive awareness of the app, and to monetise video through sponsored and branded campaigns.
Here the brand’s recent separation from the BBC is crucial to the strategy. Immediate was created by the acquisition of BBC Magazines by private equity company Exponent back in 2011. Good Food was published under BBC licence until 2017, when the publishing group was acquired by Hubert Burda Media. Immediate bought the Good Food business from BBC Studios and extended the BBC license until last year, when BBC Good Food simply became Good Food.
Simon Carrington, Commercial Director at Good Food, explains that the decision was driven by the need to compete without the commercial restrictions of BBC guidelines, which prohibited content produced with commercial partners featuring Good Food talents.
“We felt we were becoming uncompetitive in a commercial world,” says Carrington. “That was really the key driver of that decision. And 18 months in, we’ve got some fairly sizeable commercial partnerships. Morrisons is a big campaign for us that wouldn’t have happened under BBC guidelines, because we could never integrate talent or integrate our content with a third party. So it’s been a successful transition so far.”
And while Immediate remains committed to maintaining the level of editorial integrity built on its BBC heritage, loosening those commercial restrictions opens up new kinds of talent for the company to work with. Whereas Good Food previously featured a roster of BBC talent, the publisher can now enlist celebrity chefs who have relationships with Channel Four or ITV – or even social media stars, such as its recent partnership with food influencer Poppy O’Toole.
Too many cooks?
Expanding the publisher’s talent pool allows Immediate “to play much more in the food creator space”, according to Doyle, as the food video market becomes increasingly competitive. Recipe videos are no longer the sole domain of specialist publishers and newspaper brands, but increasingly produced by influencers and social-first players such as Mob Kitchen, while the UK broadcasters are also moving onto YouTube to meet younger audiences.
“Food is probably the most competitive space in video within the publishing world,” comments Carrington. “Some of the food influencers are as big as the traditional publishers in terms of their reach, their output, and their commercial appeal to advertisers. So we’re competing on a number of fronts. Luckily we have a brand that has 30+ years of heritage behind it, so that gives us a head start, but it’s still extremely competitive.”
In that increasingly crowded environment, preserving the user experience (UX) and premium nature of Good Food is key to the publisher’s positioning. James Florence, Head of Advertising Technology at Immediate, says the business is looking to move away from “sticky autoplay” video content as much as possible. “We really want to go back towards really high-quality, actively viewed, click-to-play, sound-on video, similar to CTV,” says Florence.
The company is currently testing content recommendation systems to help drive that UX across its websites, and to boost video engagement by surfacing content relevant to the user journey. This in turn aims to attract spend from advertisers looking to align with premium content and engaged audiences, and in many cases also with their sustainability goals.
Earlier this year the publisher launched IMClear, a sustainability tool used to assess how campaigns run across the Immediate portfolio measure up to an advertiser’s ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals. Using data from ESG measurement company The GoodNet, the solution can provide campaigns with scores relating to environmental factors, wellbeing and equality. And Florence notes that positioning the tool as less of a sustainability product and more to guide “internal accountability and corporate social responsibility” is helping to drive adoption.
“I think if we were trying to push a sustainability story about a particular product, that becomes a little bit more difficult,” he comments. “And that’s a shame to be honest, but that seems to be the environment at the moment.”
Instead the product focuses on the content side of ad placements, helping advertisers see what kind of content their ad budgets are supporting, and whether those alignments are reflective of their ESG values. And while the tool currently only covers direct display campaigns across Immediate’s websites, Florence says the results suggest the publisher overindexes on high-quality, low-carbon inventory.
“When we pull the reports together, they make quite a nice story,” he says. “Every report I’ve seen that we’ve run so far is shown to support at least one of the advertiser’s core ESG values. We usually pick out three that are most important to them, then we figure out whether our sites are able to speak about those values. We also have a great portfolio of brands here that are very engaged with these kinds of topics, and that attracts advertisers who share those values.”
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