Eating Albion

Last night was Gordon Ramsay’s Cookalong Live, which brought Channel 4’s Big Food Fight season to a culinary close. (If you missed it, it’s on again this Sunday at 8pm.) It was a great way to round off a successful season, mainly due to TV, online, and marketing all working beautifully together.

To encourage user feedback and to create a buzz, we set up a Flickr group and a Facebook event for people to contribute to, and this was the most interesting aspect for me. 1,192 guests, 439 wall posts and 253 photos on the Facebook page, and 65 members and 339 images in the Flickr group. Bags of online content, downloadable instructions, tool tips, counting down print ad campaign, and even some handy advice from me on how to take better pictures.

The above numbers might not seem huge compared to the TV audience (and we’ll have to wait till Monday for that figure 4.2 million people watched it), but let’s just think about what’s happened here. All those people bothered to spend their hard-earned money on the ingredients, invite friends round, do the cooking, and take time to photograph and comment about it. That’s a massive ask and a brilliant bit of viewer and TV event interactivity. Also, as of yesterday afternoon, 3,500+ people had signed up to the Cookalong map, including one guy in Denmark.

Some other things of interest are the discussions and comments. Some people found it went too fast, some wanted fewer film bits in between and a recap on what they’d just done, and others wanted a more complex menu. Channel 4/Optomen and Gordon would be mad not to make it an annual event.

Finally, Ross Anderson in The Times said:

‘It’s reprehensible enough that hardly anyone these days can cook without a recipe book, but Gord’s Cookalong heralds an Orwellian culinary dystopia…’

Hmmm, are those grapes sour, Sir? Anyway, below are some of my favourites pulled in from Flickr and Facebook. And just you try telling the lady with the rolling pin she’s part of an Orwellian culinary dystopia!