Sizzling Success: Culinary Content Giants Mike Duffy and Matt Holloway Serve Up a Digital Marketing Feast

Unlock the secrets of culinary content kings Mike Duffy of Yum Crunch and Matt Holloway from Bad Manners. Our kitchen conversation sizzles with their innovative strategies for captivating the palates of digital audiences. From selfie marketing triumphs to the subtle art of social media algorithms, they dish out anecdotes of their journey reshaping the promotional playbook. Their insights serve as a masterclass for foodpreneurs eager to stir organic growth and turn customers into loyal brand promoters through the magnetic power of online engagement.

Feast on our rich discussion about the future plate of the restaurant industry. As hashtags and QR codes become the new salt and pepper of marketing, we also carve into the generational shift where social video content is king, and multitasking millennials and Gen Z-ers are the court. Listen as we cover the seismic shift toward social media dominance, exploring the multitasking trends of content consumption, and speculate on the future of AI in the kitchen, stirring both awe and a pinch of nervous anticipation.

As we raise our glasses to the power of human connection, we can't help but get excited about the potential of an AI-generated hologram cookbook—sparking a debate on tradition versus tech in the culinary world. Mike and Matt join in, reflecting on the importance of actual engagement in the algorithmic age, and we close with a nod to the unity that shared meals and conversations bring to our tables. Tune in to whet your appetite for innovation and leave with a full serving of wisdom for the digital age.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

From the masters of the universe event from last year, we have one more special episode to bring you Joining us this week Mike Duffy, the Emmy Award-winning CEO of Yum Crunch, a New York Times best-selling cookbook author and content creator. Matt Holloway, let's talk great content creation on this week's Digital Restaurant. Hi guys, thank you for joining us. Mike, Matt, lovely to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, your companies and what are you guys about? Tell me about yourself first.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Sure, mike Duffy, ceo of Yum Crunch, yum Crunch, yum Crunch, yum. Is this part of Yum Brands? What? No, we are the content brand that is inspired by Yum Brands, because we'd love to be a hundred billion dollar company or whatever they're worth, but right now we're just a little start.

Speaker 3: 1:02

You're on your right man. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Yeah, co-founder of Ugly Brother Studios, been making TV shows for a long time and shifted over into social video, making food content.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Meredith, are you feeling under pressure right now? I feel like we've got an expert with us.

Speaker 3: 1:17

Yes, I think we have two experts.

Speaker 1: 1:18

Oh my gosh, Matt, tell us about you.

Speaker 4: 1:20

My name is Matt Holloway. I am the co-founder of Bad Manners and I have co-authored five cookbooks. Fifth one just came out, Hungry Self. Feel free to pick it up.

Speaker 1: 1:34

We should put a little pit shop here.

Speaker 4: 1:36

Oh well, yeah, I mean I'm like I'm stopping on your material here.

Speaker 1: 1:40

It feels like a bundle to me. Yeah, I think we need to have the three bundled up.

Speaker 4: 1:43

We need to have enough people to buy the two of them, and the Amazon is just going to bundle it automatically, that'd be great.

Speaker 2: 1:48

Yeah, if you guys need video content, I'm all over it.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Yeah, perfect Guys. We're only spending a few minutes with a few of the guests here at the Masters of the Food and Beverage Universe dinner. In front of us here is this huge table, so we've got a whole array of people that are changing this industry, disrupting this industry. It's really exciting, but let's talk about 2023. For you, what have been some of the highlights, the challenges that have stood out to you and your businesses?

Speaker 4: 2:16

I'll just say, speaking to the cookbook space, it doesn't work the same way as it did 10 years ago, like when our first book came out. You really have to rely a lot more on social media as opposed to back in the day. We just go to bookstores and you do signings and it's a packed house. Now, when you get a cookbook deal for any first-time authors, I mean, you guys, this is your first book, right?

Speaker 3: 2:39

There are two.

Speaker 4: 2:40

Two books, two books, your second book. You know like it's difficult trying to promote a book without social media. So I think for me, one of the biggest shifts that I had to make with my business partner in our company was to be more social media focused, which we are way late on that, like TikTok's already taken over, so social media is definitely like not going the way, so resonates with me.

Speaker 1: 3:05

We thought writing a book was hard. Marketing a book it's almost harder. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that's so true. And do you know the trick For anyone that's writing a book out there? This was our big trick. Should we share it? The selfie?

Speaker 1: 3:21

We had people holding the book up with a selfie and it suddenly everyone else wanted to hold the book up with a selfie and suddenly the network the cross-network in effect became just crazy and it enabled us to get to a best-selling stage. I'm sure this was something that you've tried to deploy as well.

Speaker 4: 3:36

Oh yeah, I mean, you're always trying different things. You never know what's going to land, because our brand is pretty irreverent and we use salty language. We started a trend I think it was our third book where grandmas were gifted their book by grandkids, their kids, and they would just ask them like, hey, read the recipe. Of course it's swear words and they're just, and they're looking at it and they're like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. What is this? What did you buy me this?

Speaker 2: 4:00

isn't the joy of cooking.

Speaker 4: 4:01

And that helped so much, but it was very organic. Yeah, so it's ever-evolving and I even I struggle to wrap my head around social media.

Speaker 1: 4:11

Mike, I'm sure there are countless examples of folks that are doing this well. What is working well? What has been a challenge for you in the influence of space?

Speaker 2: 4:21

Yeah, it is a challenge in social video, but it's also the best opportunity. It's truly democratized content. You can reach anybody anywhere. It's decentralized. Whatever your channel is, you can reach your audience. So when I look at this, year was a huge sea change in viewing behavior and you can look whenever you're sort of wondering okay, how are viewers consuming content? Just look to where the advertising dollars are. This year, for the first time in the history of media, 51% of the advertising spent went towards scatter, which is to say something other than legacy television legacy content, and the vast majority of that actually went into social video.

Speaker 2: 5:05

So this year social video, the value of social commerce and social video is just under a trillion dollars. When you look at the three year time horizon, by 2026, it's projected to be 2.9 trillion. So the opportunity in social commerce and social video is unprecedented.

Speaker 1: 5:26

I just want to double click a little bit into that if we can, because one of the things that I think I find when I spoke into restaurant owner operators is how much time, investment and resource to put in to social media. I recently was speaking to a big franchise group that had 12 units in a particular part of the Caribbean and they had a tenth of what Slutty Vegan, which has the same amount of units as that particular location had.

Speaker 1: 5:53

And what blew me away was, if you invest time in this, the reach and the efficiency of that reach and the ability to be able to create a digital engagement and connection to your guest is absolutely amazing, and it's actually digital hospitality that's greatest.

Speaker 2: 6:09

Digital hospitality.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Absolutely. Can you explore that?

Speaker 2: 6:12

thing a little further. Absolutely. Slutty Vegan is a great example. Pinky Cole is a former LDTV producer and what Pinky did was she became kind of an influencer on her own and then turned that into Slutty Vegan. I think they're going to have 13 franchise locations opening up in the next year. I think they have four or five right now. She's a great example of telling her own story.

Speaker 2: 6:34

What restaurants can do is it's not. You don't have to have an anti-bordain-esque production crew around you. It's just about being in fact. That's the opposite of what social video is all about. The key is authenticity, which is imperfect video. It's being honest. It's being transparent. It's not you know. It's showing the.

Speaker 2: 6:55

When you shoot yourself on video and you're telling your story about your restaurant, it's using the one that you messed up, not the one that you got perfect. Viewers love that. They feel related to that, and the best example I can give is Mr Beast, the most watch person on the planet. Here's a guy who he defies everything you would think a on-camera talent or host would look like and talk like, and the reason is because he grew up on YouTube and he's himself, and when he puts his videos up, he's transparent, he's honest. His product integration is not scripted. It's hey, I love this Nerf gun, you should too. And he shoots one of his crew members in the face and moves on to the rest of the video.

Speaker 2: 7:38

So it's really about being authentic and telling your story. Every story is a hero's journey. I see this as a restaurant owners all the time and chefs If you want to grow your audience, just read Joseph Campbell, just look at the hero's journey or the hero with a thousand faces. Recognize that your story. Most chef stories are interesting. I always say chefs are unemployable in any other industry.

Speaker 4: 8:04

I'd agree with that.

Speaker 2: 8:05

Yeah, they're people who are mavericks and they're inherently interesting and they work 120 hours a week, so they don't have to have a full-time job. It's madness. But, mr Beast, what he did was he tapped into something that was him being himself. Chefs can do that, restaurant tours can do that. You can do it locally and grow your audience by just being straight up. Hey, this is who we are. We're trying to make it. It's hard to make it in the restaurant industry. Give us some support. We're going to tell you our story and you're going to follow us all along the way. That's what Pinky did with Sleddy Vegan, and her audience actually made her a success. Do you think?

Speaker 1: 8:42

it's easier therefore for the independent restaurant owner operator that has got that very distinguishable story versus versus some of the big chains, Is this a big advantage? For the small restaurant owner or a pizza.

Speaker 4: 8:54

I would think, yeah, absolutely. If you have funding and you have a board and people who invested, that you have to reply to. If you make a silly TikTok, they might get upset about it and you're like, no, this is doing well and they're like, no, take it down. Whereas if you are relying on your audience and they trust you and it does feel authentic, it just naturally blows up. But yeah, I think to that point, you really do have to. You have to become multifaceted. You have to be organic. Pinky's a homie, by the way. We had her on our podcast, not trying to plug my stuff. She was she's such a sweetheart and she's so smart, like she understands marketing. And she like our first book dropped, I think in 2014. And she was like, when your book dropped and there was like swear language and stuff like that, and you were so reverent that opened a floodgate to other people like pinky, that could be like, oh, I don't have to be like stuffy, I can have fun with it. And then I was like, oh, pinkie, don't forget me.

Speaker 1: 9:57

Okay, she's doing great she's crushing it.

Speaker 2: 9:58

But yeah, that mirrors what's happening in food culture, right, like we used to be fine dining, it used to be Noma, it used to be La Bernardin and, all due respect, amazing Michelin restaurants, but now it's cheap and cheerful, it's fast, casual it's more accessible, and when you look at chefs on social media and then you look at food influencers, what you see is a sort of irreverence and that unpolished kind of passion for food that is itself a growth engine.

Speaker 2: 10:31

Chefs can do a lot by learning from food influencers and food influencers can help chefs a lot. So that's the other hack is to sort of if you're a restaurateur or chef and you wanna really grow your audience, have a real interaction with a food influencer that you respect and that can really kick everything off, and you appeal to the algorithms, which we're all we all need to appeal to the algorithms I think we're all working for the algorithms now. We are, oh yeah, out of doubt.

Speaker 3: 11:00

So do you? Each of you have a favorite social media platform that you think is most effective for restaurants and chefs?

Speaker 2: 11:08

Instagram is a visual channel and what's nice about Instagram is you can take pictures of the food and post it, and you can encourage your diners to do that, and then they have Reels. Reels is your video platform, it's your video channel, and when you can post Reels and you can post on Stories as well not only can you memorialize a video on Reels, that's gonna live on your channel. So if somebody wants to learn your backstory, they can go to your Reels. But if you wanna say hey, you guys, we're popping off right now, we've got this amazing evening, and if we have certain guests in town or we're doing certain specials or whatever the thing is, you put it on your Stories and people will start to sort of tap into your Stories and it can be hosted by one of your sous chefs, it can be hosted by a line cook or some of the wait staff or a bartender. It doesn't have to be the same person all the time. It certainly doesn't have to be like the most well-spoken person.

Speaker 1: 12:04

I'm loving this conversation. Of course, you guys have literally a various different great influences that have got great reach, but what about the actual guests themselves and the free advertising that can come from social sharing and how you can encourage that? Any hot tips?

Speaker 2: 12:19

Yeah, foodies are super passionate. There's 47 million American foodies. These are people who are highly educated. They make on average six-figure income, predominantly female, and what you look at, especially in millennial Gen Z diners, is their social currency is what they post on their social channels. Right, they're digital natives. I'm an analog native. I grew up in a time when it wasn't entirely digital world. But when you look at digital natives, their primary world is digital world and so social currency for them is taking a picture of that dish and actually sharing it with their friends, and I think restaurateurs and chefs should encourage that and also put hashtags on the menus, put a QR code there, give them tools so that they can amplify for you and they will reward you.

Speaker 3: 13:07

Make it easy.

Speaker 4: 13:08

Make it easy, I think that's the making of this interesting point. I think I've seen a lot of restaurants and food halls and food spaces move towards the social media angle, where they have the neon sign with the clever saying or whatever they want people to come in and take that photo and share it in Tagum. As a photographer myself, I can say I love when I post a photo and you can do another slide and there's a video right next to it. Not a lot of platforms allow that, but TikTok. If you're trying to build an audience, tiktok's probably going to be the faster platform for that. As long as you're consistent with your posting, you just have to do it like, unfortunately, just every day, and you just got to hit that drum, and they can't all be bangers, can't be precious with it, you just got to keep posting, so yeah that's great, make it authentic.

Speaker 3: 13:50

So you were saying that streaming media is legacy and I was blown away because I guess that dates me. But can you talk a little bit about that and what you think is replacing it and how that relates to what you see happening in 24?

Speaker 2: 14:06

Yeah, without a doubt. So when I think about legacy media, it's anything that's behind a wall. It can be a paywall, it can be a device. It's anything that you can only access in one place. So that is Roku, that's Netflix, that is every streaming channel, that is all of cable, that is all of broadcast.

Speaker 2: 14:27

What is amazing is social video is the dominant form of video in the world. They say streaming wars. Right, youtube won the streaming wars. Netflix recently posted in their earnings report they were number one in the world for the share of streaming globally, except for YouTube. I'm not a mathematician, but that's number two and it's about a six to eight point difference.

Speaker 2: 14:54

So what we're seeing is millennial and Gen Z, as they're becoming more powerful consumers. They're spending their money and they're spending their time in social video where they can have a rewarding experience. That's multifaceted. So you can watch a sort of nostalgic TV show on YouTube and then you can go and follow the stars of that show to find out what they're up to now on Instagram or if they have a TikTok channel. You can watch YouTube Shorts, which are the short slices of that show, and it's this amazing. It's the most available content ever.

Speaker 2: 15:33

You've got the largest distribution network in the history of media at your fingertips, as long as you don't think I need to be centralized. The numbers are interesting. When you look at Gen Z viewing behavior, they're spending 216 minutes every day on YouTube and social video. Compared to TV traditional TV, it's about 60 minutes a day, and their Gen X and Boomer counterparts are the reverse. If we're thinking OK, what does the future of food media look like? It looks like it's decentralized, it looks like social video, it looks like it's not so stuffy and it's more accessible, and it's about chefs and influencers all at once, which inherently includes the audience.

Speaker 4: 16:21

I got a question from Mike. I see this a lot, not just on TikTok but on Instagram now, where and I think this is specifically the younger generations where you have somebody who's like an expert in their field they're gardening or they're cooking or they're doing whatever, and they're sitting there and they're trying to make the recipe, but then it's like a split screen where there's a video game playing, because our ADD brains can't sit through a recipe for 45 seconds. That's new and weird and I don't like. I see a lot of it, but I like I'm not sure where that's leading us. Do we do a third split screen at some point? I don't know. What do you think about?

Speaker 2: 16:55

that, well, everything we all can relate to a multi-screen experience, right? So even when we're watching TV in the 16 by nine, we all also have our mobile.

Speaker 4: 17:04

Oh, everyone's on their phone.

Speaker 2: 17:05

We're double screaming all the time yeah you're surfing the internet.

Speaker 4: 17:08

You're watching whatever's on.

Speaker 1: 17:09

My wife hates when I do it and you're not doing either of them particularly well.

Speaker 4: 17:13

You know you're splitting your attention, yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, I looked at it when I started trying to understand consumer and viewer behavior in social video. I was I'm a guy, my background is in making long form TV, making the fancy award winning stuff right, and my brother and I are co-founders and we've made all these shows and we've won Emmys and James Beard Award, nominated for James Beard Awards, for our visual language of our shows and for our editing style and for our direction. And in social video they don't give a fuck.

Speaker 4: 17:48

Oh no, they're like crank it out they just get it out. Yeah, volume over quality, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:54

And for me, I would say, my first direct to consumer job. I was a standup comic. I was a regular at the comedy store and the audience always told me what they wanted. I've always been beholden to what the audience is telling me they want. And the audience now. They want something that is more accessible and they want things that they can watch in a side by side. That's not to say that they're not going to sit down and really dedicate to something, a story that really grabs them.

Speaker 2: 18:20

It just raises the bar on the type of story that you're telling so that you can really capture their attention.

Speaker 4: 18:23

Yeah, we still want, like our game of Thrones, you know, but it is. It's a trend that I've noticed happen over maybe the last, the last year or so, and I feed into it because I'm like, well, this is my scatterbrained and you're not again, you're not doing anything, you're not paying attention to either video particularly well.

Speaker 1: 18:42

Hi, carl, here just to interrupt the show briefly to remind you that if you have yet to get your copy of either of the delivering the digital restaurant books, now is the time to get one. If you head to the digital restaurant, you're going to be able to get the best price available. You can also listen to both books with yours truly talking about them on audible. You can get a copy of Amazon if you'd prefer to order through them, but if you haven't got the book yet, get them. They really are going to transform the way in which you look at the restaurant industry and the way in which technology is disrupting it. So what do you think this all means for the future of content? I mean, you've written cookbooks. We've written like business books and yeah, there's AI. There's these folks out there. I even my wife right now is making this is your Christmas present Some Christmas bark that we saw on an Instagram reel 45 seconds. Yeah, we didn't need a cookbook for it. What does the future hold for us Consent producers in that regard? Do we have?

Speaker 4: 19:39

a future, do you think? Oh, I think, as a photographer, for like one minute, when AI came out and I was playing around with it and doing prompts, I was a little nervous. I was like it still looks weird, like the food doesn't look perfect, it's like when the AI adds like a finger to someone's hand. It's not there yet. I think in the next three to four years, it will not only be there, but we'll have to use it. I think that restaurants will shoot their grub hub menus and stuff and then they're gonna decorate everything around the burger. So like it's gonna simplify our jobs, it's gonna streamline it and, as much as a creative writer or photographer, it is something that everyone's like. How should we be afraid of it? Should we embrace it? I think that we just need to learn how to use it. I definitely. I think it's something worth embracing. I'm excited to see what it's capable of. Right now, I feel like I have job security. I'll say that.

Speaker 1: 20:34

That's great. Let's finish up talking about 2024, and what would you like to see more? Let's start with you, Matt, from restaurants. What, how much more do restaurants need to embrace this space that we've been talking about?

Speaker 4: 20:46

This is maybe just a specifically American thing, but I would like to eliminate tipping. I think that we should pay people a livable wage and if that increases menu prices, then that just it is what it is. And I know I have a lot of friends who are restaurant tours, a lot of people who work in the industry. I understand it's tough to raise menu prices. You're scared, you're worried you might scare away the customers. But I just spent some time in Europe and it was incredible to not. You just get the bill and that's it, you know, and it's-.

Speaker 2: 21:15

Yeah, but you had that moment, right as an American, where you're like, do I tip? And you feel like a jerk because you don't and you're with a European and you're

Speaker 1: 21:22

like. No, we all love you. I feel like because you guys do tip, yeah right. I want the American table.

Speaker 4: 21:27

Yeah, totally so. I don't know. I would like to see. I think restaurants have come back on a big way from COVID. Everyone's online. It's great. The product shots in the early days of COVID were pretty bleak, so I had a lot of work there while I was trying to help people. I'm like you got to be online yesterday. You got to have food representation on your menu and stuff like that. Everyone's standing on their own too right now, and I think we just need to eliminate tipping.

Speaker 1: 21:50

Mike in your answer. Perhaps I could ask you that one of the things that we run up against a lot with the folks that we speak to is the journey to a point where they can recognize that maybe they need an influence to help them. How does the folks that perhaps aren't ready get to that point when they can say, actually I need to give Mike a call?

Speaker 2: 22:09

It comes down to this if you have a story to tell, you're ready, we're all entrepreneurs, we're all founders. If you're in the food industry, you're creating every single day in some form or fashion. That's great story. People love that and the more real you can be with your audience and share that story, the more they want to support you. And it keeps you honest too, right. So a lot of times we're afraid to kind of go here's my vision and you hide because you don't want people to criticize it. But if you put it out there and you receive that feedback as very critical feedback, you can actually evolve the whole experience for everybody. And then the best case scenario is when they feel like they're part of your team instead of somebody who's a passive guest, who's just gonna roll in, pay an oversized tip and then go on to the next restaurant, maybe never come back.

Speaker 3: 23:03

I think the best advice that I got when we started on the social media adventure for our book was just put a lot of content out there, like you're saying. The world's gonna let you know what's good content, what's bad content, based on views, and guess what? The bad content never gets seen by anybody. You don't have to be nervous about putting something terrible out there because no one will see it.

Speaker 4: 23:23

Absolutely Well, like in Les' Twitter, at which point never tweet.

Speaker 1: 23:27

Never, I guess.

Speaker 4: 23:29

Yeah, actually Twitter should have X, whatever you all call it, they should have a function.

Speaker 1: 23:33

What is the verb for tweeting these days? Is it tweeting or is it Xing?

Speaker 4: 23:36

Musk likes calling it a post. He doesn't like calling it a tweet anymore. He's very particular about that. Yeah, well, I think as soon as you post something on Twitter, I think it has a 45 second delay before it just disappears. Doesn't matter what it is. Could be a joke. Whatever, most people's opinions don't need to be heard. It's a scream into the void that nobody needs in their algorithm.

Speaker 1: 23:56

So yeah, Guys, I don't know about you, but if this has been fascinating, we should absolutely get you guys back on at some point. Good luck with the sixth cookbook. Yeah, it didn't announce it, but I'm sure it's coming and yeah we'll see.

Speaker 4: 24:09

Yeah, it's going to be an AI generated book. It's going to be a hologram. Just wait for it.

Speaker 1: 24:14

There you go, Mike. Thank you as always. How can people find out more about Yum Crunch.

Speaker 2: 24:18

We're at Yum Crunch across all of our social handles. I'm Mike Duffy on LinkedIn and we're just out there trying to have the algorithms help us out, which means humans need to help us too by liking and sharing and commenting, that's great.

Speaker 1: 24:31

Well, we've got a meal in front of us. Let's go tuck in. Thanks for having us, yeah thanks for having us here.

Speaker 4: 24:36

Yeah, appreciate it.