• by Kate Kaye , August 5, 2004

The traditional European practice of lingering at the dinner table for hours and discussing the pleasures of the palate were commonplace in the household of today's In the Trenches subject, All Recipes's Esmee Williams. Her French mother instilled a love of cooking in her, and her career background has brought her brand marketing savvy. It was the Internet that combined the mix into one appetizing work situation.

Throughout her career, Esmee has somehow always ended up dealing with food in one way or another. Following positions at Nestle where she helped launch products, and McCann-Erickson where she continued to hone her marketing skills, Esmee took a role in brand management for Sierra On-Line (now Sierra Entertainment), a PC game company that selling CD-ROM software, including a cooking software product called MasterCook.

Now, as vice president of marketing and partner affairs at All Recipes, she oversees all things advertising for the recipe site, including account management, ad creative development, and branded mini-site design. All Recipes garners about 4 to 4.5 million unique visitors per month, 20 percent of whom are from outside the United States. One promising prospect for All Recipes advertisers including Kraft, Weight Watchers, and Kellogg's: around 70 percent of site visitors go grocery shopping the same day they visit the site.

What are your favorite online destinations in the a.m.? Why?

First I always check All Recipes. I want to make sure it's working!

My morning is in two pieces. It starts around 5:00 or 5:30 at home. I usually check My Yahoo! I like the custom news headlines. Then I typically go to my All Recipes e-mail and try to get rid of all my spam right away and make sure there's nothing that needs my immediate attention.

I do pay a lot of attention to all the online rags...IAB (IAB SmartBrief), MediaPost, ClickZ. Every variable is in constant motion, so you have to make sure you're reading everything to understand what's new that's happening.

What other sites do you visit frequently? Why?
I go to the other recipe sites, partially for work and partially for fun because I like cooking.

I shop a lot online; it's as much browsing for fun as a means to an end. I spend a lot of time on Amazon, go to Google for search. I also like Ofoto. I take a lot of digital photos.

And I used to go to the (Seattle) Mariners Web site, but they're so awful this year!

What is the most challenging part of your job?
I think it's just there's always so much opportunity. There are more ideas than there are resources. I'm always trying to plan against a moving target, but that's also the thing that makes the job fun.

All Recipes are leaders, but we're a small fry. We have to act like a big guy; we have to work harder than (larger Web publishers) do, but you get creative that way. We have a much more efficient audience. They not only know how to cook, but we can target (ads) to just folks who would be more apt to buy a particular brand. Our customization is a benefit over the big guys. The big ones are not as nimble.

What do you like best about your job; what keeps you interested?
I just love the creativity and the problem solving. It's a lot to focus on. I've got to be extremely open minded and flexible to change. We just don't get too comfortable; we re really passionate about what we do.

When will true media integration take place for advertisers?
We've got to find ways for agencies to profit (from developing Internet advertising campaigns) so they'll allocate dollars to it. Brand managers tend to be younger, more Internet savvy, but the farther you go up the corporate ladder, management is not as savvy about the Internet or as open to new technologies.

I'm optimistic it is something we'll see increasingly happen. The big dogs have to lead; they have to forge a new path and provide validation. I think by 2006 it will be an expectation that there needs to be some component of online.

What's the most divisive online policy issue right now?
One of the things that's really frustrating is the poor man's metric of click-through. It's a long time coming for brands to embrace the banner's value for branding....

We're really excited about view-throughs (DoubleClick's metric measuring the latent effect of online ads). Maybe we can come up with some common research or tracking metric that helps get view-though data in real time. It would be really great to be able to tie an online experience to an in-store purchase.

Another issue is that a lot of our advertisers are trying to build empires of their own (online destinations featuring content similar to that of All Recipes). We try and build a better mousetrap to differentiate our product.

Do you know someone who deserves a salute from MediaPost's In the Trenches? Let us know! Contact Kate Kaye at kate@mediapost.com.