Home-grown Asian Food Channel has a feast of fresh ingredients, a whole new online banquet, a voracious appetite for short-form, and a growing taste for the advantages of digital transparency. In the past nine months, Scripps Networks Interactive’s Asia MD, Leena Singarajah, has restructured the kitchen and rewritten the recipes. Here’s why...

As painful as it might be for subscription video players in Asia, looking at current realities, leaving the past behind and figuring out that the future requires a new recipe is “not rocket science,” says Leena Singarajah, Scripps Networks Interactive’s Asia MD. “It just requires discipline”.

And focus in a universe running in a hundred different directions, caught up in a major FOMO moment. “From a tech standpoint, there are so many solutions out there... It’s so easy to get carried away,”
Singarajah says. “We have to be very specific in finding the right technology and the solution that can help up complete the user journey.”

That complete user journey – the holy grail of brands and marketers – began early this year when Singarajah looked at Asia Food Network (AFC) “and realised that our digital assets were not built to play to the needs of AFC’s online consumers”.

“People want more online, more information, more education, more learning,” she says. The aim of the company-wide transformation she set in motion was to “make sure we could create those assets to complete the user journey, be it from TV to digital or from another digital destination.” This included everything from redirecting content resources and restructuring departments to create a standalone digital unit with its own targets, to rethinking social media conversations. Somewhere in between, Singarajah insisted her team started looking at the website as an independent property rather than as an extension of (and a marketing tool for) the TV channel. “We had to think, work and act differently,” she says.

A major advantage is the content pipeline from the two-year-old Scripps Lifestyle Studios in the U.S., which gives Scripps in Asia access to 1,000 short-form videos a quarter. “Content velocity is very important, and I didn’t have to start from scratch,” Singarajah says. About 20% of the videos streamed in Asia are made in Asia. Content created by Scripps’ Asia team is, in turn, shared with the U.S.

What does digital success really look like? “A combination of audience engagement and the ability to monetise,” Singarajah says. Less than two months after the AFC website’s June launch, monthly average page views were up 150%. The recipes section was up 314%. Newsletter sign ups were up 4,000 in six weeks, averaging about 100 new sign ups a day compared to between 10-20 on the previous site. One of the videos had 1.5 million organic views and 48,000 shares. It’s a good start.

Perhaps the steepest learning curve in the expansion online is “having your performance stare you straight in the face,” she adds. “In TV, you can sit there and stare at the ratings and argue about why a piece of content did or didn’t work. In digital, there’s no argument about, for instance, sample sizes... You don’t get to sit there and have a meeting for three months. You have to act and react in days and show the audience that you heard them and this is how you are going to fix it”.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 print issue for MIPCOM 2017 in Cannes