Fallow

Is it fun to watch Beat Bobby Flay or Guy's Grocery Games? Sure. It's a fusion of Brand Marketing and Entertainment designed to provide an audience for advertisers (that's you) to interrupt the customer with a marketing message.

Last week about 365,000 people watched the new episode of Beat Bobby Flay, with 63% of the audience age 55+.

Have you watched Fallow on YouTube (click here)? This is an altogether different proposition. Two chefs in London teaching you all of the secrets of cooking in an informative and entertaining manner, with a humble, humorous, honest history-based approach. They've created more than 600 videos. They have 1.2 million subscribers. Average video clunkers attract a half-million views ... the gems attract more than three million views.

• Point of View Video:  Head Chef at a Top London Restaurant.
• Every Way to Fry an Egg.
• The Three Salmon Techniques Every Chef Should Learn.
• Is British Food Actually That Bad?
• This Is Why Vegetables Taste Better In Restaurants.
• We Cooked The Best Michelin Star Dish From Every Decade.

This is the opposite of Direct Response Marketing.

It's also the opposite of Brand Marketing. Toyota's Brand Marketing goal is to get you to buy a car. It cannot be the goal of these two chefs to teach you how to make something so you don't have to go to a restaurant, much less their restaurants, which you'll never visit anyway because you don't live on their continent.

What would you call this style of marketing? It's not vapid Influencer Marketing. It's something fundamentally different ... no different really than what Ryan Hall Y'All has done with Weather.

If you are a Direct Response Marketer dealing with dying marketing channels and/or expensive clicks and/or decreased response ... you are blessed ... somebody has opened a door for you.

P.S.: Here's a video that got over 800,000 views of a reviewer sampling the menu at Fallow. It's hard to be successful at this fusion of mini-movie-making and community and not have fabulous products/merchandise.

P.P.S.:  They freely give away all of their secrets. All of 'em. If you run a restaurant, you can copy them. Have at it. When I launched my business in 2007, I freely gave away everything I did - every technique - even today when I went through Action Streams, I shared everything in the booklet with you for two months before publishing the information for a nominal cost. You can give everything away AND still run a healthy business. Back in the 2007 - 2010 timeframe, service providers would corner me at a conference and inform me of what a moron I was for giving everything away ... "YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO MONETIZE A BUSINESS". Sure I do. I'm using a very different business model than they were(are) using. Right now, the fusion of community and mini-movie-making is trending toward a different business model ... and from the outside, one might think these folks are morons. Time will tell.