2015 Bronze Best Digital Destination

Uncle Bens

Ben's Beginners

The Team
Matt Turnbull, Liam Donnelly, Steve Stretton, Georgia Totvanian, Phil Hollbrook, Mike Hannett, Patrick Heaney, Gau Narayanan, Raquel Chicourel

Campaign overview

Having identified that families were no longer cooking together, Uncle Ben’s wanted to change this using its established platform, Ben’s Beginners.

This campaign was not about brand awareness or likeability – for it to work it would have to deliver tangible response in the real world, with the objective set at getting 268,000 parents cooking with their children more often.

With over 3.5 million views of its cooking content and a huge increase in the audience’s likelihood of cooking, Ben’s Beginners succeeded in making parents more likely to cook with their kids.

Strategy

With research showing that a quarter of parents never cook with their kids, two insights emerged: parents didn’t think about cooking as something that was vital and didn’t know how to approach it as a task. Cooking by themselves was one thing, but doing it with their kids was another thing entirely.

The solution sought to address both these issues in an environment already proven to be a springboard for action, especially when it comes to cooking and food: YouTube and digital content. The strategy began with making parents think about the consequences of not cooking – the reliance on junk and takeaway options and the lack of understanding around healthy choices – and then provided two-tier content to show them the value of cooking with their kids and how to do it.

Creativity

To get parents to listen, the campaign dramatised the consequences in a completely different way. The team created a house without a kitchen and put it on the market, with real family buyers looking around. The results were filmed as they realised this was a family home of the future, designed without a kitchen to reflect the cooking habits of today’s generation.

This film, Kitchenless Home, created a groundswell of parents willing to address their behaviour and set up the second part of the strategy. Saturday Shows were designed to feel like a unique blend of weekend morning cooking programme and kids’ TV: something that could speak to parents and kids alike and deliver a recipe in a fun, engaging way, using talent relevant to both audiences.

These were hosted on YouTube and seeded out in relevant media over a 12 week campaign.

Results

Kitchenless Home was viewed over 1.3 million times, supported by media seeding, while the average view duration of 58% on YouTube and 71% in external online environments showed that its difficult message had successfully been delivered in a way parents were prepared to listen properly to.

But the real measure of success for Ben’s Beginners was always response. Its 12 cooking shows were viewed nearly 3.5 million times by over a million parents, while research showed 30% of those would cook more with their children as a result. That means more than 300,000 parents are cooking more with their children as a result of Uncle Ben’s £700,000 campaign – or, put another way, each family that started to cook together cost just £2.33, less than the price of Big Mac.