How Pocket Aces' Gobble is satisfying the appetite of brands' content needs

The brands rely heavily on digital content marketing to increase engagements with consumers. They are always on a lookout for digital channels and partners who can help them increase consumer engagement with the brand.

Gobble, a food, travel and home decor channel across social media from Pocket Aces stable, claims to have a stronger engagement compared to its competitors in the food content space.

Sonalika Mehra

Sonalika Mehra, Channel Head of Gobble, in interaction with BuzzInContent.com, said, “Most of our series see an engagement rate around 4-5% as compared to the industry average of less than 1%. We focus on increasing the number of comments, shares and likes on our content pieces. Our relatable content feeds such content where people tag their peers.”

Over the past few years, Pocket Aces has developed some of India’s most popular digital platforms such as FilterCopy, Dice Media and Gobble and a mobile app called Loco, which focusses on gaming. Last year, it also launched the ‘Desi animation’ platform Jambo.

Contributing a good portion of Pocket Aces’ overall revenue, Gobble’s growth has tripled in the last year. It approximately garners 200 million views per month on the platform while reaching out to around 16 million people every month.  The team has tripled in size and now has 15 members.

Mehra said that since its inception in 2016, the channel has produced a lot of branded content for companies like Cadbury, Bacardi and Wonderchef. In fact, every third piece of work on the platform is branded content. The platform’s branded content philosophy is very similar to its other verticals in creating organic, relatable brand integration.

Previously, Gobble was only creating content around food. At the beginning of this year, the channel launched its two new verticals, home décor and travel, and also announced its rebranding. It now aims to double the viewership with new verticals in the picture.

When Gobble created the show, ‘Hungry on the Highway’, a blend of travel and food, it realised the connection between the two categories and how people who are interested in learning more about food are interested in décor as well.

“We decided to evolve Gobble into verticals, which are kind of like natural engines to food. Home decor because the target audience of Gobble is very similar to the target audience of people who are looking at home decoration. We then understood this overlap of audiences,” said Mehra. It also plans to explore the beauty and fashion categories as well in the future.

Under its vertical, Home, it had earlier launched one pilot episode for the home renovation series called ‘Home Genie’ in November and will create more episodes from February. And for its travel verticle, the brand has already produced a branded piece of work ‘Love, Travel, Repeat’ for Hyundai.

Discussing the growth plans for all three verticals, she said, “We will be looking at long-form content like series and a lot of short-form content as well. We will create approximately two to four pieces of content every month for each of these categories. We are also expanding our team quite a bit to support this.”

Having started its journey while getting onto the trend of table-top recipe videos with the aim to do it first and best in India, the platform has some successful properties such as ‘Love versus Food’.

One of its most successful branded content initiatives has been with Bacardi’s Dewar ‘You Got Chef’d!’. 

“This was much more impactful and had big celebrities for the first time. Each episode had a theme with much better quality content and the integration came out really well,” said Mehra.

For a platform whose major chunk of revenue comes from brand integration, it is mastering itself to seamlessly integrate a brand in any content piece without disrupting the viewing experience.

Even while creating branded content, Gobble keeps content as the priority and create solutions which are customised for the brands. “We spend a lot of time understanding the brand requirement and what ROI they expect. Our sales team closely work with the brands’ teams to understand their objectives. We closely evaluate brand integration and ensure it is a vital part of the content.”

Explaining how brands have become much more welcoming and understanding about brand integration than before, Mehra said, “They now know what gets them ROI. When brands see ROI either themselves or see others directly getting ROI through brand integration, it becomes much easier to convince them. Sometimes you have to meet them midway, which happens through conversations in educating a brand about what really works and what doesn't.” 

Emphasising the importance of having content that is relatable and accessible to viewers, she said, “We've usually seen that less accessible topics don't get that much relatability from the audiences. But for any niche brand, less accessible content can work. The most important thing is to keep content relatable and real, similar to fiction content. We have to make sure that our content in these lifestyle categories doesn't come across as inaccessible to the audiences. Instead, they should be able to relate to it, so that they can also travel to the same places and get a similar experience. We want to build on the experiences, getting in more non-fiction, more real way."