Benjamin Christie is both Founder and MD of Gourmet Ads, a global (Australian owned) food ad network reaching over 13 million Grocery Buyers across the US, Canada, UK and Australian markets.

Here he discusses the Gourmet Ads publisher offering (Tastydays, RecipeBridge). Christie also discusses the launch of their private ad exchange, Gourmet Ads Marketplace in the US with Cox Digital Solutions and AppNexus - and Gourmet Ads’ plans to launch private exchanges in other markets.

Can you give an overview of Gourmet Ads, background, its offering and markets its you active in?

Gourmet Ads is a food advertising network which operates in USA, UK, Canada and Australia marketplaces. Our focus is on running branding campaigns to reach the grocery buyer online. We do this by managing the advertising on over 300 hand selected cooking websites, where consumers are spending time online researching recipes, making meal decisions and developing their grocery shopping lists. We run everything from standard IAB units, through to portal type solutions such as background skins, roadblocks and interstitials.

Our advertisers typically fit into two main areas, endemic food advertisers and non-endemic advertisers. Endemic food advertisers are who’d you’d expect to see on recipe and foods sites such as multinational food manufactures, speciality food companies, kitchen products, supermarkets, wine brands and other food retailers. Non Endemic advertisers are generally speaking campaigns aimed at women which typically include retail, automotive and travel verticals.

Can you give an insight into the size of Gourmet Ads? Who are Gourmet Ads’ competitive set?

Globally we serving around 90 million ads per month, reaching over 13 million Grocery Buyers.

Each region has their own direct competitors, but typically speaking we compete with large food portals and standalone recipe sites.

As an Australian owned company what challenges did Gourmet Ads face within Australia and expanding outside of Australia?

The greatest challenge would be the vast amounts of travel. I’m a firm believer in personal relationships with clients as well as with our individual sales people. As such this means I travel great deal of the year, so lots of time on planes and nights in hotel rooms.

Time differences are naturally a challenge.

Will Gourmet Ads expand further into the APAC region?

Currently, our focus is on the Australian market only.

How do Tastydays.com and RecipeBridge.com fit into the Gourmet Ads model? Are you a publisher as well?

Yes we are a publisher ourselves. Around the world, we’ve consistently seen digital advertising agencies seeking content integration for client campaigns. Initially we tried to do this with partner sites, but the execution of them wasn’t done so well.

This was the main motivation for building Tastydays, and later on why we acquired RecipeBridge earlier this year. We’re currently working on brand solutions for both sites to really offer portal like landing pages for brands which can be setup in minutes not weeks.

How does Gourmet Ads work with publishers to monetize their inventory? What type of publishers?

First of all we’re rather strict on the type of sites that we include in Gourmet Ads and we do publish an eligibility criteria. Publishers must be food centric and we do prefer sites which create recipes. We include food portals, recipe websites and food blogs. We consider a range of items when reviewing sites, key items are above the fold placements, quality of traffic, content creation and finally willingness to accept high visibility ad units. In terms of monetization for publishers, we provide websites we work with either standard IAB sizes, through to video pre roll and high visibility units like back ground skins, over the page ads and interstitials. Some sites will only take IAB sizes, however sites who accept high visibility units will greatly benefit from a revenue perspective.

Does Gourmet Ads have an  exchange strategy? Do you work with DSPs and other inventory providers/aggregators in the space? Is RTB part of your strategy?

In terms of a platform, we’ve been working with Admeld for a few years now which has performed well across our inventory. In recent times we have been working with more and more trading desks in particular here in Australia and the USA. It’s very much a watch this space as we are working with a few trading desks on initiatives and will be announcing it soon.

Can you tell us about the recent launch of your private exchange in the US? Who are you partnering with?

Together with Cox Digital Solutions and Appnexus, we launched the Gourmet Ads Marketplace. This is where agency trading desks can bid on our inventory in real time. It’s very much early days, but we have a few agency trading desks that are buying a great deal of inventory each day which is a positive start. Some agencies are targeting our grocery buying audience, others are buying inventory using either 1st or 3rd party data sets. Over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring more agency relationships.

What does launching a private exchange mean for GourmetAds as a business? For Agencies? Publishers?

Once a relationship is in place, it means agency trading desks can access our inventory as they require it. Some agencies we’ve locked down CPM pricing for first look at impressions, others simply bid on the inventory.

For our publishers it means that we’ll have a larger range of brand advertisers with solid CPM rates for their inventory.

For Gourmet Ads, it means we can continue to grow the business. It allows us to increase significantly the number of publishers we work with, thus increasing our overall audience numbers.

Does GourmetAds have plans to launch private exchanges in other markets?

Yes, very much so. The plan is to take the learning’s of our American Private Ad Exchange into other territories as soon as possible. Outside of the US, we’ll be working with Admeld who we’ve worked with for a number of years. We don’t have launch dates yet, but our plan is to launch in Australia next, due to the high demand we’ve had from agencies here.

Has the rise of popular culture (e.g. Master Chef) had any impact on Gourmet Ads? Audience?

Absolutely and not just in Australia, but right around the world. The public’s fascination in all things cooking has had a positive effect on the business. Mainly it has helped bring food companies to move their advertising to online, as well as motivating people to start food websites.

What type of innovation in the rich media space is Gourmet Ads exploring?

Rich media is extremely important to our key clients. Many of our Rich Media Solutions can’t be purchased through real time buying and has been a key difference in the RFP process.

For us though it isn’t so much about the creative itself (agencies do a great job of this), but rather how we deliver a portal like rich media campaign across hundreds of sites currently. The process has of course been refined campaign after campaign, and now our trafficking team can execute rich media campaigns at scale quickly and easily.

I call that an innovation.

What role do video and mobile play in Gourmet Ads’ overall strategy?

We’ve seen significant interest from advertisers this year when it comes to video.  Most recently we’ve developed a platform for publishers to monetize their video assets which is in its early stages.

We’ll be working on mobile in 2012, with the upcoming launch of the mobile site for RecipeBridge. We know people are already using the site for searching recipes on the go and believe this will be the marque site for our mobile monetization strategy.

What’s your view on how media/audience buying and the online landscape will evolve over the coming year? Ad Nets? Publishers? Agencies?

As we roll into 2012, we’re already seeing the landscape change. Our view is that within the next 6 months 50% of advertising will be bought through “traditional” means and the other 50% through programmatic buying methods like agency trading desks.

These landscape changes of course presents new business challenges, but we’ve already adapted to the change, and like all media companies have learnt from our mistakes early on.

What will we see from Gourmet Ads over the next year?

We’ll of course continue growing the number of publishers in Gourmet Ads, which in turn grows our audience numbers. This is a constant with us.

Video and Mobile are of course two of our key focuses as 2012 comes around. Finally, we have some exciting developments with Recipebridge which are slated for release in Q1 2012.

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