By skyforbes 
ITV’s Cooking With The Stars is a great show and a great example of branded entertainment we follow at PWR House.
M&S co-funds the series, with contestants using M&S products to help drive sales for M&S Food.
However, the marketing behind this TV show misses the biggest opportunity for eyeballs and attention…social media.
The Cooking With The Stars Instagram account feels like a neglected college side project and they don’t even have a TikTok account.
The combined audience of the stars on the show is in the millions. It should be easy to leverage the appeal of the talent and create compelling content for social.
Here’s what I would do
1 — The low hanging fruit is clipping — use TikTok and Instagram as a place to share not only the most engaging clips from the show but any interesting BTS content.
2 — Drive conversation on social — people are always talking about shows before episodes, during episodes, and after episodes. Creating content that encourages participation taps into the latent fandom.
3 — Work with Creators — there are thousands of creators who would love to work with M&S/ITV to promote the show, at a pretty decent price and with a very reasonable ROI.
M&S and ITV create pretty good content on social media. They should have the in-house marketing capability to make this happen.
And btw, this isn’t a matter of achieving social media vanity metrics. The more eyeballs and emotion you bring to your product (Cooking with The Stars), the more the commercial value increases.
And for M&S, they can drive BETTER ROI on their content investment. More M&S Food sales will come from more eyeballs and attention on social media, especially on TikTok and Instagram.
You don’t need to spend more money on the production. You should spend money on driving the cultural conversation on social media in order to build desirability for your brand.
The real ROI from branded content comes from driving results and if you’re not taking advantage of Instagram and TikTok (at a bare minimum), you’re wasting your money.