Each day Gourmet Ads has over 25,000 different advertisers running campaigns with us which typically fall into four different categories.

  • Advertising agencies
    Wide ranging – from global agencies to small regional and local agencies
  • Client direct
    Generally larger companies with internal media buyers who directly book with us
  • Self-service
    Smaller advertisers who manage campaigns using our Self-Service Platform
  • Programmatic
    Sophisticated advertising agencies and direct companies that buy advertising in real time through automated systems

No matter the type of advertiser, advertising is either ordered on a contextual or audience basis. Basically, we see a 50/50 split between the two different buying models. So what does each of these buying methods actually mean?

Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising means the advertiser wants to be featured alongside content that is contextually relevant to the campaign or brand they are promoting. Advertisers could request content categories as broad as “food and cooking” or as specific as “steak recipes”. Approximately 50% of our advertisers simply want to advertise near food, cooking or recipe content. Most are food, wine, beer or supermarket brands, but we do have many finance, automotive, fashion and travel companies who come to us specifically to advertise on food sites because of the strong results they experience.

Highly contextual placements

We do provide advertisers the ability to target depending on their targeting requirements for the campaign. So it’s entirely possible to have a steak advertiser only target a steak recipe on your site and no other pages. Sometimes advertisers don’t want to reach people that are looking at a contextually-relevant-recipe (like steak), and instead wish to target content not contextually relevant like seafood, chicken, pork or lamb recipes hoping to influence the audience to buy steak instead.

Audience advertising

Audience advertising is becoming increasingly popular with advertisers mostly because they can target specifically, and not waste impressions.  This is a popular option when an advertiser is trying to reach a specific audience, or, in some case a specific user.

Types of audience advertising:

Broadly speaking, Gourmet Ads has two specific audiences which are closely aligned on a contextual basis; the main household grocery buyer and the main household cook (sometimes this is the same person). The main household grocery buyer is very important to any brand on supermarket shelves, and of course the supermarket themselves. As a result, these people are targeted with all types of advertising from food to kitchen consumables, housewares, consumer packaged goods (like detergent or tissues) and fashion.

The main household cook is important to food brands as they influence the grocery buyer because they make meal decisions for the household. This person is highly desired and also targeted by advertisers.

Another category of audience advertising is “demographic advertising”. This is where the advertiser wants to target only women or men and/or a specific age group depending on their campaign, even opting to use different ad creative for each demographic group.

The fastest growing audience advertising is, surprisingly single users, specifically, their behavior on sites previous to visiting your site. Often referred to as retargeting or remarketing, this occurs when a user visits a website but doesn’t “convert” (i.e they don’t purchase or sign up for something).  After the user leaves the site they will be targeted depending on campaign requirements. Industries that use this type of technology extensively include automotive, fashion, finance, real estate, travel and all types of ecommerce websites. Automotive will typically continue targeting a user 5-6 weeks after they leave their site as that is the typical sales cycle for people buying a new car. Conversely, the travel category typically retargets people for only 7-10 days after visiting a travel site.

Non-food advertisers typically have higher CPMs than food

As you can see, we run campaigns in a variety of ways, some targeting your content and some your audience. Publishers appreciate that non-endemic advertisements in travel, lifestyle, fashion, finance and automotive industries typically pay higher CPM’s than endemic food.