Uncle Ben’s set out to solve one of our country’s most pressing problems – a whole generation of children losing cooking skills. We created a YouTube channel of unique cooking content to get kids and parents cooking together, with a direct response campaign to drive our audience there.

On relevant sites we seeded a ‘social film’ about the need for parents and kids to cook together more. This targeted parents with children aged 5-15. We also used pre-roll ads as ‘tasters’ of each piece of recipe content. These were aimed at all adults, as targeting parents would have limited exposure to YouTube users who were logged in.

We created a cooking channel for the dual audience of parents and children. It’s a unique blend of Saturday morning cooking programmes and Saturday morning kids TV. We sourced talent with followings that fitted with our audiences. Our host is a prominent member of Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube network with a large social presence. Our child star ‘students’ are well known among the younger YouTube audience.

Our comprehensive series of films covered key skills, food provenance and recipes. The films were released week by week to build up a cooking school momentum – with pre-roll ads as ‘tasters’ of recipe content each week. On relevant sites we seeded a ‘social film’ about the need for parents and kids to cook together more. This targeted parents with children aged 5-15. Offline we used a tag on a 30” TV ad and 4.5 million rice packs to point our audience to the channel.

The social film was viewed over 1m times in the first fortnight with an average view duration of 65%. The recipe content has already achieved over 3.35m views. Of these, analysis with our Mediacom partners showed that to be 1.05m unique parent viewers. Further, research with Nielsen discovered that 30% of those who watched the content would cook more with their kids as a result. That means over 300k families are cooking more as a result of Ben’s Beginners. Not bad from only £815k investment.