There’s probably no food more American than hot dogs. And “In Search of Real Food,” Unilever’s 12-week series of webisodes that began playing at Yahoo! Food June 28, started with a film from Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Willie’s Dawgs, a homegrown business prepares delicious dogs with all the fixings.
“The point of the show is to travel across America to see what real Americans are eating and cooking,” said Kim Martin, senior VP of Embassy Row, the production company that joined forces with Bobby Flay, the celebrity chef, to launch Rock Shrimp Productions, which produced the series with Ogilvy & Mather.
Each weekly show will include four webisodes, including a user-generated segment, which in the first program featured the Vendley brothers, who cook Western style tacos. “We loved them because they are originally from California and moved to New York and they were missing the food they grew up with, so they decided to open a taco stand in downtown Manhattan,” Martin said.
Production teams will travel to Moab, UT, and the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif., for future episodes.
The goal is to promote Hellmann’s mayonnaise, which is as real as the foods shown in the webisodes because it’s made with real ingredients, including eggs and oil and vinegar. “The creative team was developing new positioning for Hellmann’s focused on real food,” said Doug Scott, executive director of branded content and entertainment at Ogilvy & Mather. “We were tasked with going beyond the advertising into other forms of marketing so we developed the idea to search for real food and look at real people.”
The videos star Dave Lieberman, a Food Network chef, who talks with consumers about their real food and prepares recipes, which in the first show was potato salad with Hellmann’s. “We’re establishing a link between product positioning and the idea of real food,” Scott said.
“Consumer research was done and people had a misconception of what was in mayonnaise,” he said. “They didn’t think it was real, so based on those insights we found a sweet spot in the marketing about what to communicate. It reinforces the idea of real food and allows the consumer to engage in a dialogue.”
Consumers can submit their own real food videos at the site, which could be included in future episodes.
The webisodes were shot with MiniDVs, with editing done on Avid with a small documentary crew, Martin said.
Embassy Row is a production company that specializes in culinary programming, including Boy Meets Grill, a Food Network show starring Bobby Flay that began in 2002. Rock Shrimp Productions unites Flay with Martin and Michael Davies, the president/CEO of Embassy Row. Flay and Martin are executive producers. It’s the first Rock Shrimp endeavor.
A Yahoo spokesperson said Yahoo! Food receives 4.3 million visitors per month, and has played video content for other advertisers, including Kraft and Pillsbury. The Hellman’s webisodes will play for 12 weeks, then remain on Yahoo! Food until the end of the year.
Supreme Court Allows Multibillion-Dollar Class Action Lawsuit To Proceed Against Meta
The Supreme Court is allowing a multibillion-dollar class action investors' lawsuit to proceed against Facebook parent Meta, stemming from the privacy scandal involving the Cambridge Analytica political consulting firm.
The justices heard arguments in November in Meta's bid to shut down the lawsuit. On Friday, they decided that they were wrong to take up the case in the first place.
The high court dismissed the company's appeal, leaving in place an appellate ruling allowing the case to go forward.
Investors allege that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump 's first successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
Inadequacy of the disclosures led to two significant price drops in the price of the company's shares in 2018, after the public learned about the extent of the privacy scandal, the investors say.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company was disappointed by the court's action. "The plaintiff's claims are baseless and we will continue to defend ourselves as this case is considered by the District Court," Stone said in an emailed statement.
Meta already has paid a $5.1 billion fine and reached a $725 million privacy settlement with users.
Cambridge Analytica had ties to Trump political strategist Steve Bannon. It had paid a Facebook app developer for access to the personal information of about 87 million Facebook users. That data was then used to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign.
The lawsuit is one of two high court cases involving class-action lawsuits against tech companies. The justices also are wrestling with whether to shut down a class action against Nvidia.... Read More