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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

marketing

Want to Make Cool, Modernist Cuisine Style Food Videos? This Kickstarter Might Be for You!

High-end commercials are expert at making you hungry or thirsty — chips literally explode with nacho cheese flavor, orange juice flies across the screen before slowly cascading down perfect cubes of ice.

If you run a scrappy CPG company that has champagne product video tastes but a beer budget, or you just want to make cool food videos a la Modernist Cuisine, then you should check out The Garage Learning online film school project, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

The Garage is offering up a mix of online classes for different levels, in-person workshops (which they say will follow COVID-19-related protocols), and perhaps the coolest part: DIY kits to build things like catapults, LED lighting and sliders.

There are different levels [–OF WHAT?–] available, depending on your existing skillset. The Beginner course teaches you how to use your smartphone video, and there are also 101 classes in lighting, electronics and basic rigging. Intermediate is more for still photographers using DSLR for video as well as special effects and slow motion. The Advanced level teaches higher level motion control, compositing techniques and entrepreneurship.

Prices vary from $29 for one beginner class to $199 for a one year intermediate subscription to $2,999 for everything including the DIY kits. Classes are scheduled to start in June of 2021.

One of the people behind The Garage is Steve Giralt, who sharp-eyed readers might recognize from a video he put out last year about shooting video with robots. The Garage is taking that initial video and really blowing it out into a full-on class.

Being able to put more of a professional polish on product videos would actually be a useful skill for a lot of startup food brands. Hiring creative agencies and video houses is expensive and time consuming, and the ability to create your own videos in-house that make a small up-cycled, plant-based snack bite as alluring as a big chain cheeseburger on TV could be boon for budget conscious entrepreneurs.

Coca-Cola Adapts Digital Marketing to Our New Pandemic Normal

In the abstract, it’s easy to know that the pandemic is affecting everything. But it’s when you get down to the nitty-gritty practical level that you fully understand just how COVID really is impacting everything. Like, for instance, how important pictures are when people are buying your products online.

Marketing Interactive has a story up about moves Coca-Cola is making to adjust its marketing efforts in the wake of coronavirus. From that story:

The company will enhance its brand presence on the “virtual aisle”, investing in high-quality content such as photos, videos and product descriptions, to ensure its brands look as good online as they do in store.

Coca-Cola is also working with retailers to increase the visibility and attractiveness of their products on screens, ramping up SEO, and working with restaurants to make sure its drinks are featured on menus.

It’s no surprise that Coca-Cola would be making these moves. Online grocery shopping has had record adoption and sales since March, thanks to the pandemic, reaching $7.2 billion in June. While restaurants yo-yo between being open to in-person dining and closed as the virus waxes and wanes, one thing for certain is the move to more contacless experiences. These new contactless measures will include digital payments and menus becoming standard.

Of course, Coke’s moves are also coming on the heels of a 28 percent drop in sales for the company as high-volume customers like restaurants, ballparks and movie theaters all shut down because of the virus.

While Marketing Interactive focused on Coke, it’s safe to assume that every CPG brand is making similar moves. If the only way consumers can interact with your brand is through a screen, then companies better make sure that that imagery is optimized for multiple types of screens and that those images look good.

In the 80s, Coca-Cola’s ad slogan was “Have a Coke and a smile.” Smiles are a definitely harder to come by nowadays, but with its new marketing efforts, Coca-Cola is making sure you still get your Coke.

Will Punchh’s New ML-Based Customer Lifetime Value Predictor Create More Data Darwinism?

Punchh, a software startup that creates digital marketing tools for physical retailers like restaurants, announced the release of its new machine learning-based “Predictive Customer Lifetime Value” (PCLV) application this week. But will this new technology just be another avenue for data darwinism?

CLV is a metric companies use to predict how much money they will reasonably get from any one customer. The concept certainly makes you wonder whether restaurants are feeding you meat, or if you’re the meat feeding the restaurant. Regardless, it’s something restaurants are using more. Fellow restaurant app-maker, Toast, did an explainer post on CLV awhile back.

From the Punchh press release:

From the moment a customer makes their first purchase, Punchh instantly predicts their CLV, then constantly refines that prediction as the relationship between the brand and customer deepens. Based on that PCLV, retail marketers can create target segments with this data to, for example, encourage high CLV segments to enroll in rewards programs while offering low CLV segments incentives through coupons.

While this PCLV may be useful to a restaurant for marketing purposes, it also feels like more data darwinism, like my purchases will determine a company’s level of interest in me. If a restaurant predicts that I’m a low-ticket customer for them from my very first purchase, will they just ignore me? Or will I get worse service? I asked Punchh about this and Xin Heng, Punchh’s Senior Director of Data sent me the following response:

Xin: They won’t be ignored, they will just be put in a different bucket (or segmentation). In other words, low CLV customers will be continuously monitored and treated with winback campaigns. But those who are outside this segment can be subject to games, compression campaigns, a referral callout and more. It’s just about segmentation, but every customer is consistently monitored regardless of what segment they fall into.

Great(?), a restaurant will still be sending me emails no matter how much–or little–I spend! The company is billing the PCLV tool as a restaurant’s virtual data scientist, but it seems like moneyballing me could be just another way that data ruins dining out with too many predictions about my behavior.

We’ll soon see, as Punchh works with more than 160 brands including Pizza Hut, Del Taco, Denny’s and TGI Friday’s. The company has raised $31 million in funding and earlier this month opened up an engineering hub in Toronto.