Glam Media, Inc., the number one vertical social media company with the largest online global reach in lifestyle, today launched its newest branded vertical—Foodie.com, built from the integration of authentic food-related content and social networking to help people share and connect on the journey of food discovery. Foodie features a combination of established food critics, high-quality bloggers, chefs, restaurateurs and other food influentials. Brand Advertisers running at the launch of Foodie.com include Betty Crocker and Dannon Activia.
Food for the Age of Social
Foodie is the result of the last two years of work in understanding how social media is changing how consumers are discovering and following restaurants, chefs and recipes, as well as the influence that food critics, bloggers and reviewers have on food culture. It represents the third generation of Glam—with content from publishers, Owned & Operated content from authors on Foodie, and for the first time—a full social network for consumers to directly discover, connect and follow top foodies.
“With time spent in magazines declining significantly, consumers are turning to online and mobile as their primary source for food content and ratings, but face the challenge of differentiating great food critics, premium bloggers, recipes and ratings online today. At the same time, traditional food guides such as Michelin only capture editorial and inspectors, missing the social energy surrounding food today,” said Samir Arora, Glam Media Chairman and CEO. “Glam Media built Foodie.com to be the single platform for all things food on the Web. Foodie is going to completely change consumer’s food experiences on digital, powered entirely through a social platform and driving the freshest, authentic content created by leading voices from top chefs, critics, bloggers and brands.”
As a part of the launch, Foodie is also creating a panel of culinary experts, including five acclaimed food critics and five top chefs to help drive an authoritative perspective on recipes, restaurants, ingredients and cooking techniques. This group will help nominate the world’s top restaurants and provide regional guides that will be produced regularly.
Brand Content Campaign
For nearly a century, Betty Crocker, one of General Mills’ biggest brands, has been providing consumers with food ideas that are both inspiring and doable, helping people create memorable connections with their families and friends through food. The brand will be providing high-quality recipe content to consumers through Foodie’s various channels.
“General Mills, through brands like Betty Crocker, is an expert in the food vertical and for decades has been leveraging the power of food content to connect with consumers,” said Doug Moore, Vice President at General Mills. “We are continuing to evolve beyond our owned assets to broader content partnerships such as Foodie.com. We need to have a more objective view of content in order to be successful, and partnerships that force us to behave more as publisher than advertiser are exactly what we need now.”
Foodie.com
Glam’s Foodie.com is the first vertical channel to combine premium content and social interaction into one integrated platform, bringing people, social profiles, fan pages, social feeds and discussions together with recipes, menus, chefs and restaurants. Built on the premise that relationships between people are what drive consumer engagement, Foodie taps into the knowledge and authority of top food authors and the Foodie community to surface the best, freshest food content for consumer’s personalized tastes.
With more than 100 premium food authors such as Inspired Taste, Kitchen Confidante and The Bakery Spot, Foodie includes over 1,000 new recipes, bringing together the most influential digital foodies in one place. Known as the Foodie Ambassadors, this chosen group of the Web’s most passionate, in-the-know food bloggers engage with and guide consumers through their Foodie journey to discover new flavors, trends personalities and products in the food world like never before by providing access into home kitchens, restaurants, specialty stores, farmers markets and other foodie hangouts.
Alongside this list of experts, Foodie.com will also create a new qualitative social ranking system that offers Michelin-quality ratings of restaurants. The ranking is based on a 100-point scale and is comprised of crowd-sourced ratings, editorially curated critiques and input from professional judges to go far and beyond any current food and restaurant ranking system that currently exists.
As a company that is focused on providing great tasting foods, The Dannon Company is a brand launch sponsor of Foodie. “In the pursuit of our mission to bring health through food to as many people as possible, we never lose sight of the importance of taste,” said Raman Sehgal, Senior Manager, Media Strategy & Digital Marketing, The Dannon Company. “Activia is all about digestive health and working with Foodie.com is an engaging way for us to connect with our consumers, who also expect great-tasting food, like our new Activia Harvest Picks.”
With the launch of Foodie, Glam is also releasing its first consumer application—starting with a recipe finder app that allows consumers to discover and follow top food editors and chefs, vertical recipe search, and join the social conversation with comments, likes, and posts that is fully integrated with Twitter and Facebook. It marks a significant pivot for Glam—a move to directly providing technology platforms and applications to consumers.
Foodie will reach approximately 10 Million consumers per month initially. For more information regarding Glam Media’s Foodie.com, visit: www.foodie.com.
About Glam Media
Glam Media is the pioneer of vertical media that connects the world’s top brand advertisers with targeted vertical audiences online. Glam invented the first commercial blog network in 2005 to harness the power of Social Media for brands. Since then, it has grown to reach more than 200 million unique visitors globally, and is #1 for lifestyle, #1 for women and is a Top 10 US Web Property. Glam Media has more than 4,000 premium content creators organized across multiple vertical categories online including: Glam.com for Women, Glam Entertainment for Adults, Brash.com for Men and Bliss.com for health and wellness seekers.
Glam Media has headquarters in Silicon Valley, New York, and London, with offices in Brisbane in California, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Pune and Mumbai. Glam Media’s investors include Information Capital, Accel, DFJ, Walden Ventures, Hubert Burda Media, GLG, and Aeris.
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