Supermarkets have found the infiltration of TV screens a common battlefield in Australia, where watching a cooking show demonstrate a recipe can’t be shown without the lavish intrusions of a paper towel sponsoring the segment, hinting gently and quietly undermining your cleanliness by providing an answer for the extreme, impenetrable mess you’ll inevitably make. Master Chef, aka, Curtis Stone’s Face Broken Up By Brief Segments Of Cooking Challenges, Not The Other Way Round, proved that a stark reality with their nauseating partnership with Coles: incessantly informing viewers of their prices’ trajectory (down).
Because Woolworths couldn’t bare to have it rival Coles steal all the appropriate-marketing fun, they’ve one-upped the supermarket by launching their own TV show—assumedly because someone at Head Office told them that would be a thing people would definitely watch. Hm.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports a “New Channel Ten show Recipe to Riches will see everyday
consumers pitch product ideas to a panel of judges and a Woolworths
executive – the person with the best idea will win a commercial deal
with the supermarket chain.”
Executive producer of Recipe To Riches, Stephen Tate has claimed that the show won’t be paid for by advertorial content (it’ll just have ‘Woolworths’ smeared all over it, completely different story) and defended the show’s heavy partnership by saying that programs regularly collaborate with sponsors to remain afloat—such as record labels partnering with The Voice—so it’s credibility should remain in tact.
One of the show’s judges is Woolworths’ customer engagement manager, Lizzy Ryley, who said excitedly, as if the secret lives of sixteen year old shelf packers
could make for truly riveting television; groundbreaking, never before seen,
with the lyricism and poetry of Hemingway, etc: “What this [show] does is it lifts the lid on how a product gets to the
shelves…That was one of the big opportunities for
us, to let people see behind the scenes.”
Via SMH.
Title image by Torsten Blackwood for Getty Images.
