Bustle and Taste of Home Bring Tuscany to Your Table

In the fight for media budgets, publishers are getting more creative and in some cases that means getting into bed with competitors. Bustle Digital Group together with Trusted Media Brands has created a campaign for Italian food products Bertolli, including a recipe club designed to appeal to the separate publishers’ two different audiences. The campaign will run from September until early 2022. The Recipe Club was designed in time for Italian-American Heritage Month in October. It includes cookery hack-style recipe videos called Short Cuts—like this on spaghetti squash marinara boats, featuring Bertolli’s d’Italia sauce—designed to appeal to Bustle’s audience. Sat next to these videos are more complicated recipes like air-fryer ravioli and cheese manicotti aimed at TMB’s Taste of Home audience. 'Thinking big to serve clients better' “We’re in a world now where we all need to be thinking big to serve clients better—this was a win win win,” said Lora Gier, executive vice president, sales and marketing at Trusted Media Brands. “Bertolli was the right client, Bustle has been the perfect partner and not every partner is perfect.” The challenge, she added, is “finding the complementary brands, the team that wants to work together and the right kind of mindset to deliver the right product for the client.” It’s not unheard of for publishers to partner with competitors, especially if the client wants to be associated with a niche publisher for credibility but needs a heavier hitter to reach the scale. While not the case with Bustle and Taste of Home, these tie-ups are often led by the agencies and brands, said Laura Wade, vice president EMEA, content and innovations at Essence. “What is exciting is that more media owners have the foresight to think they might not win the brief without an external person to hit that younger or older audience—that’s real progressive thinking,” Wade told Adweek, adding that more publishers are showing this kind of initiative to stand out and win budgets. And for the client, aside from audience, they often get the benefits of economies of scale in terms of production. In August, Bloomberg Media and Ebony teamed up for year-long content creation and sharing tie-up to drive new audiences, viewing their respective audiences as complementary with slim duplication. Definition of a force multiplier In the food media space, there’s been a surge in advertiser demand for custom-food-related editorial as more people turned to at-home cooking during the pandemic. As more people are getting comfortable eating out and spending less time cooking at home, the pressure is on to maintain pre-pandemic audience highs. Bustle and Taste of Home's campaign includes custom co-branded video, Bertolli-product-specific recipes, a store finder feature stocking specific products, content and social amplification. In November, Taste of Home is releasing two custom recipe videos featuring Bertolli’s Traditional Marinara sauce to tie in with the holiday season. Bertolli gets the benefit of scale, reaching Bustle’s 45 million-strong younger audience as well as Taste of Home’s 30 million audience of more advanced cooks. Across both audience pools, there’s a 17% overlap, according to the publishers' analytics. Trusted Media Brands had the existing relationship with Bertolli but working with Bustle had been on the publisher’s mind. Receiving the RFP in June was the right opportunity to make it a reality. Neither publisher shared how much the brand is paying for the campaign but the two are splitting the revenue fairly evenly. Trusted Media Brands’ SVP of Marketing on ‘Nicest Places’ Program & Digital Revenue Strategy “There was no sense of ownership, we were both able to grow business," Jessica Jones Studholme, senior vice president, sales, Bustle Digital Group told Adweek. "It’s the true definition of a force multiplier, we can give the client what they want and need.” Getting different teams within an organization to align can be challenging enough without going outside the walls. Making sure the product and the content felt seamless for Bertolli was important, said Studholme. “[The process] was clear, concise and beautiful, like a Tiffany box," she added, "the simpler for the client the easier for them to make a decision.”

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Bustle and Taste of Home Bring Tuscany to Your Table

Competitors turn bedfellows in the food media space

Lucinda Southern

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