Food bites flavor: Kraft campaigns - advertising supplement - On Cable

Brandweek, April 13, 1998

Celebrity chef Mario Batali pops garlic cloves, olive oil and red jalapeno peppers into a blender, whipping up a quick recipe for spicey olive oil. From his set on the Food Network, he suggests viewers store the oil in a decorative glass bottle and use it for any recipe that would benefit from a zesty pickup. Following the spot, the scene shifts immediately to a commercial for Kraft Good Seasons salad dressing, filled with images of fresh vegetables being pulled from rich-looking garden soil.

Another vignette zeroes in on Food Network nutrition expert Dr. Lisa Callahan, who offers tips for lowering the fat in everyday dishes. Her appearance segues right to a commercial for Knudsen's Lowfat Cottage Cheese.

Both vignettes are part of LA Food Bites, a highly customized campaign cooked up for Kraft by Los Angeles cable interconnect Adlink and the Food Network. The campaign has been so successful it convinced Kraft to roll it out to additional markets and influenced its decision to forge a groundbreaking spot TV agreement with cable giant Tele-Communications Inc.

"We are always looking for unique opportunities to showcase our brands," explains Gary Gruneberg, director of media buying at Kraft Foods. "Adlink came to us with an idea we thought we could tweak and make work for a series of brands."

Adlink's motivation for wooing Kraft isn't hard to figure out. The food manufacturing giant spends tens of millions on TV advertising each year and is one of spot television's largest accounts.

The Los Angeles-based interconnect got Kraft's attention by proposing a campaign that would enable it to carry one of its most important marketing tactics into spot cable. "Meal solutions are a very big part of the Kraft strategy," Gruneberg says. "If you can parallel the brand's essence with a meal solution, you've heightened the attentiveness of your audience by giving them something they are really interested in."

Adlink's proposal was simple: the Food Network would produce vignettes presenting its chefs offering clever cooking tips. The vignettes, which could air on a host of cable networks, would offer the perfect environment for Kraft's brands while subtly plugging the all-food-all-the-time network. Icing on the cake came in the form of a Prevue Channel campaign that would alert viewers to when and where the LA Food Bites would be airing and additional tune-in spots, also plugging the Bites, that Adlink would produce and strategically place on cable networks reaching the right demographics for each vignette.

Kraft liked the idea immediately. "We've been approached about cooking vignettes before," Gruneberg says, "but never have they been supported by a promotional schedule. This unique ingredient helped us to stand out and heighten the overall visibility and awareness of our brands."

The first LA Food Bite, for DiGiorno Pizza, aired in the latter half of 1996 and before long, Good Seasons, Bull's Eye Barbecue Sauce and Knudsen Lowfat Cottage Cheese climbed aboard the campaign. Kraft bought time on a different combination of cable networks for each brand, working with Adlink to tailor each campaign to appropriate viewer demographics.

In addition to Prevue, networks that have aired the 60-second pods to date have included CNN Headline News, TNT and Lifetime. The Learning Channel, E! Entertainment Television, Discovery Channel, Family Channel and CNN have aired tune-in spots alerting viewers to when and where Food Bites would air.

Kraft has kept a tight lid on results of the campaign, but admits competition to participate in Food Bites has escalated among Kraft brands since the campaign began airing. Another, hint at the campaign's success surfaced at the Flood Network, where ratings jumped each time Flood Bites, which carry the network's logo, began airing.

LA Flood Bites has been running year round since its launch. In addition to DiGiorno, Good Seasons, Knudsen and Bull's Eye, brands participating so far have included Shake `N Bake, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Kraft Salad Dressing, Oscar Meyer Mainline and Claussen Pickles. "From start to finish, this has been an inordinately successful campaign," says Jim Porcarelli, director of AOR operations at Grey Advertising. "It has found its way into the hearts of many brand managers because of its initial success."

Much of that success steins from the campaign's ability to grab viewers attention, Porcarelli says. "It's very intrusive without being aggressive. It's a wonderful marriage of the expert chef using America's brands in meal solutions."

Kraft has changed the name of the campaign to Kraft Flood Bites and is planning to roll it out to other local markets once it has finalized such details as timing and network mix for each brand selected.

Kraft's first major foray into spot cable, LA Food Bites also influenced the advertiser in its decision to boost its presence in the medium even further. In February, it announced an agreement with TCI that would enable Kraft to be a charter user of addressable cable advertising, delivering ads to neighborhoods within TCI's 14-million subscriber universe. Once digital set-tops have been deployed, Kraft and TCI will target the ads even more strategically, "addressing" them to individual homes.