Food channel wraps up $36,000 in pre-sold local sponsorships before launching

The "presenting sponsor", a large health organization, is branded with the recipe channel. Other ad positions make the initiative profitable from day one.

Case study: New sales channels
Market: Shreveportimes.com, Louisiana

Owner: Gannett Communications
Key executive: Mark Millsap, ad director

Challenge: The Gannet-owned Shreveportimes.com has numerous online initiatives directed by corporate every year. So the three or four local initiatives have to be chosen carefully. Due to the popularity of the food section, the staff decided to look at the viability of a food site that would feature local favorites such as crawfish dishes and southern cooking.

“People like the writer that we have; he does a story plus four or five recipes (in print) that are very popular. So we knew that the content of recipes would be a big hit. We started thinking, how can we make money on this?”

Strategy: The team decided to create a new recipe-based food channel,  "Simply Delicious."  They used the archive of recipes, plus visitors can also load recipes using the comments areas.

Weekly updates and top rated recipes on the main landing page, but driving force is the search engine tool, so there is not much new content to post.

Before the site launched, Millsap tested several potential sponsors to see if they would be interested. One of these,  Willis-Kighton, was already a large advertiser with an ongoing marketing campaign around nutrition. The team also approached a local wine store and a grocery store.

Results: All three signed businesses approached up as sponsors. “We knew we had $3000 a month revenue before the product launch.” Today the team has also signed up a fish market, weight loss specialist and Outback Steakhouse to advertise on the recipe site.

Lessons learned

1. Good ideas frequently take advantage of popular features that the media already has; simply redeployed to make the concept interactive. 

2. Testing the concept by pre-selling sponsorships locks in success.

3. One digital initiative every 90 days is an achievable rate for a small local media company.

4. With the popularity of regional food, a recipe section is not only popular and interactive, but can also be attractive to sponsors beyond just restaurants, including farmers markets, fish markets, health organizations and other health-related companies.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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