- A priority in her new role is creating connective tissue between brand verticals
- Platform media buys and partner marketing has been most effective in driving streaming growth
- Niara Simon-Hollis has prior experience at Fox Sports and Amazon Music
Tastemade’s new head of marketing Niara Simon-Hollis plans to dial up the flavor as she seeks to unify the independent streamer’s brand marketing strategy and message across touchpoints, including a dedicated cooking app that launched just last month.
Simon-Hollis was promoted in November at Tastemade, a cooking and lifestyle-focused media company, which among verticals, has a robust social presence, four free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels, a paid Tastemade+ subscription app, and the recently debuted Tastemade Cooking recipe app (unlimited access to which is available with a Tastemade+ membership).
StreamTV Insider sat down virtually with Simon-Hollis, who counts prior experience at Fox and Amazon Music and joined Tastemade in early 2023 as senior marketing director of Streaming.
She’s already marked success in leading marketing efforts across the company’s streaming channels including spearheading its inaugural brand marketing campaign, “Where Taste is Made” last year. That crafted the streamer’s message as a destination for food enthusiasts and lifestyle connoisseurs and has helped fuel brand awareness and streaming growth. On the back of marketing efforts, Tastemade’s streaming viewership saw a more than 40% increase globally in 2024.
In her new role, Simon-Hollis is responsible for a comprehensive brand marketing strategy that covers all aspects of the Tastemade business and its presentation to consumers and business partners, with the aim of growing streaming viewership, Tastemade+ memberships, consumer engagement, and overall brand awareness. She continues to report to Evan Bregman, general manager of Streaming & Direct-to-Consumer at Tastemade.
Crafting the connective tissue
As Simon-Hollis looks to elevate the Tastemade brand and offering, a key aim is to create “the connective tissue” among different verticals, she told StreamTV Insider.
That spans social, FAST, Tastemade+ and Tastemade Cooking. Its four streaming channels offer programming in the Food, Travel and Home & Design categories, including the flagship Tastemade channel, Tastemade Home, Tastemade Travel and Tastemade en Espanol, which are distributed across major FAST services and smart TV and CTV platforms.
Across streaming TV and social platforms, the company counts millions of monthly viewers. Its flagship YouTube channel, for example, has over 1.9 million subscribers, while Instagram has 6.7 million followers. Tastemade+, meanwhile, costs $5.99 per month and after relaunching in 2023 now has more than 100,000 paid subscribers.
Tastemade started as a social brand, but Simon-Hollis noted a need to bridge the gap for consumers between social media and streaming channels.
The “Where Taste is Made” campaign has already started to create some connection, enabling the company to build brand storytelling around its free streaming channels, including an on-air brand refresh.
Initially launched at the end of 2023, it’s somewhat evergreen in nature and has continued to run throughout 2024. It influences and has informed many other creative elements in the brand experience, she explained, with more cohesive messaging across social, sales teams and the different value offering for different brand partners they work with, and expanded into the product experience through the new cooking app (the latter which she noted was a top request from Tastemade fans).
“It’s pretty much everywhere our brand exists right now,” Simon-Hollis said of the campaign’s language and storytelling.
With the campaign, the company “spent a ton of money driving traffic to our streaming channels,” (without putting a specific figure to it) creating a distinct brand experience for viewers of Tastemade channels that also helped drive increased consumption hours and viewership.
A strong and tailored brand story also helps Tastemade stand out in a crowded FAST space and keep users on the channels longer, according to Simon-Hollis, who believes it feels different than other FAST channels that might just dump content in an effort to drive advertising sales.
With Tastemade, “you’re coming to a place that feels very similarly to how a premium cable channel would feel like a channel that actually has a brand behind it,” she said.
Platform media buys, relationship marketing drive growth
In terms of what marketing methods Tastemade has found to be most effective in contributing to growth, two of the main ways it has driven increased viewership is through platform media buys and relationship marketing with smart TV and CTV platform partners, according to Simon-Hollis.
“We spent media dollars in places where we were able to track performance that were driving people directly to our feeds to watch content,” she noted, regarding platform media buys.
Relationship marketing with partners is also key and where the marketing lead has tapped into learnings from her time at Amazon Music working on Wondery podcasts.
“It’s something that is very important to me, having relationships with our platform partners,” Simon-Hollis said.
At Wondery she learned that platform partner marketing is crucial for podcasts, where having close relationships with platforms that could promote a podcast editorially makes a difference.
“If we were able to get an editorial feature for a new show that launched, that show would shoot up to number one very quickly because Apple Podcast is promoting it,” she shared anecdotally, “A lot of that is the same here at Tastemade.”
There is CTV real estate available on certain platforms that’s utilized for editorial or programming promotion purposes, often tied to seasonal or timely programing, like holiday content, for example. And promotion of the Tastemade brand and content within places on CTV platform interfaces has driven results.
“We’ve been able to see material impacts to our streaming viewership when we get those highly coveted editorial promotional spaces that a lot of these platforms have,” the marketing exec noted.
And Tastemade’s investments in brand storytelling, elevated creative and improved marketing materials have helped drum up the excitement from CTV platform partners, she added.
Off-platform co-marketing
Another valuable avenue – particularly for smaller or mid-sized streamers seeking to reach new audiences – is co-marketing with partners.
Last year Tastemade teamed up with retail giant Walmart to offer members of the Walmart+ program six free months of access to Tastemade+. In the past couple of years, it’s also struck partnerships with Best Buy, CuriosityStream, FabFitFun, MyBundle and Verizon. When working with a limited budget it’s a way to reach another brand’s audience, potentially tapping new ones, and offer them value.
Co-marketing is a win for everybody, according to Simon-Hollis, who said that “off-platform partnership is amazing for our business” and is something Tastemade will continue to pursue.
Where Taste is Made 2.0
While Simon-Hollis’ previous position at Tastemade was squarely focused on streaming channels, in her new role much attention will be on “the second wave” of “Where Taste Made,” and how to thoughtfully connect for and convey to consumers and business partners just what Tastemade has to offer across its touchpoints.
The new cooking app and driving Tastemade+ subscription growth “are big priorities” as she spearheads marketing.
“My job is really going to be to just create connections between every vertical of our business and a larger marketing brand story that we want to tell,” she said.
Building a bridge for social and streaming audiences to further intermingle between the different offerings and to grow awareness is also part of her work.
For example, she intends to make the link between what viewers watching streaming channels are getting and the added benefit to them from becoming Tastemade+ members.
Although it has a social presence, the marketing exec acknowledged the need for an improved customer journey flow. In that regard, she cited “such an opportunity” to ensure the audience engaging with the brand on social is also aware of and can easily go to streaming channels to see more long-form content and understand that it exists. And fans can now also get recipes from culinary chefs like Andrew Zimmern on the Tastemade Cooking app, adding another layer to awareness efforts.
“I don’t want these people to exist in a silo,” she said. “Ideally, everybody would be understanding all facets of our brand and all the different offerings and verticals we have. But there’s definitely some work that needs to be done in terms of making sure that people are aware.”
Everybody eats
It’s not just existing or super fans Simon-Hollis wants to reach.
She sees plenty of potential to bring in new audiences, saying untapped viewers “present a great opportunity for us, because…everybody eats.”
Meaning that while Tastemade by some definitions may be a niche streamer (or specialty if you like) in the sense that it offers category or topic-specific content – cooking and food content in particular has the potential to appeal to a broad base, regardless of other interests.
Next year will involve testing and learning from a few different efforts on streaming, such as different on-air events and interstitials that can run to drive people to social.
And there are ways for the streamer to be very thoughtful in terms of streaming content and how to promote what the company offers to get people to engage with it more, beyond simply posting a trailer on social that they know isn’t going to be effective, the marketing exec said.
She cited excitement to work with the social team to figure out ways to engage the social Tastemade audience in ways that they feel like they’re part of the story too and want to see more.
The launch of the Tastemade Cooking app is another way for the brand to differentiate, cater to existing fans and appeal to new audiences that could be cooking novices or enthusiasts alike, be it someone looking to for seasonal recipes or weeknight meal.
A cooking app with recipes was the number one request from users already engaged with the brand, she noted, whereas previously they would’ve had to go to the web to find recipes.
It provides a way for users to go deeper with brand and get more from a Tastemade+ subscription, offering 12,000 original recipes vetted by Tastemade, with a meal plan creator included and features like the ability to organize a grocery list.
All about the details
While stepping into a new role, Simon-Hollis is no stranger to marketing services that need to cater to both casual and super fans alike.
Before joining Tastemade and prior to Amazon she was at Fox Sports as part of the brand marketing team focused on digital marketing, including for WWE and The Women’s World Cup. Brand storytelling and detail-oriented marketing for highly engaged sports fans were key takeaways from working with executive marketing VPs at Fox, who Simon-Hollis described as “just legends,” and two aspects she’s carrying into efforts at Tastemade.
“The tiniest details are going to be something that a sports fan will notice and that’s something I learned from some of our creative directors, how we needed to pay attention to that level of detail,” she noted.
Extending that to Tastemade’s streaming channels means, for example, hiring cooking talent for long-form content who “really know their stuff,” be it a well-known Michelin Star chef or a highly skilled self-taught home cook, as super fans can tell the difference.
“I do think that it’s more compelling to people who watch our channels when they can tell that they’re learning from somebody who gets it, who’s an expert, who’s experienced, and there’s something they can take away from it,” she added.
Standing out with premium content
Streaming, and FAST in particular, is a crowded space where standing out can be a feat.
To Simon-Hollis, a differentiator for Tastemade is its focus and execution of creating free premium, original content made for FAST. It’s one where the company isn’t simply checking off the “FAST” box but putting effort and dollars behind programming and brand marketing.
“If you go to some of these other channels, these other places, you don’t see a brand there. You just see the content. And we want people to understand that our brand exists here [on FAST], that this is a place where you’re going to get a higher quality content that is available and it’s for free,” she said.
In a more saturated FAST space, it’s not just about standing out to consumers, but advertisers as well. Last year Tastemade became a founding member of the Independent Streaming Alliance, which is a coalition of indie streamers that aim to show their collective strength to advertisers.
And with a recent report from Antenna showing specialty SVODs subscriptions grew nearly 20% yoy as of June 2024 (slower than growth the prior year but significantly outpacing that of premium SVODs), more advertisers might be taking notice of the engaged followings for top indie players.
As an independent streamer, it may need to work that much harder to convey its value to advertisers and consumers, but with Simon-Hollis crafting together brand ingredients at the marketing helm, Tastemade’s setting its place at the streaming table.