How much are SG food bloggers paid to promote a restaurant
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To pay or not to pay - that's the question Shakespeare's Hamlet might ask if he lived in Singapore and wasn't so hung up about wanting to be or not to be.
Instead, it's a question that is increasingly being asked in food-obsessed Singapore, where the explosion of social media has spawned a flood of bloggers/journalists writing incessantly about it: should a writer pay for a meal at the restaurant he or she writes about?
The answer may seem like an obvious "yes", but it is the reality that is causing some concern in the fiercely competitive F&B industry, where restaurants depend on a constant flow of publicity to stay on the radar of fickle diners.
It wasn't so long ago that restaurants had to depend on established newspapers and magazines to deem if they were worthy of coverage. Not any more.
Social media has opened up a whole new vista, and food bloggers once considered lowly outliers are now feverishly feted by restaurants ever-willing to barter a free meal for a good word in cyberspace.
Anyone with a smartphone is now bombarded with Instagram posts of food, blogger reviews as well as those by conventional media - and there's no way of filtering the legitimacy of one from another. Hosted meals are either not mentioned at all, or in fine print at the end of the review.
Restaurants with the means to host multiple media will always have the edge over smaller, indie restaurants without such budgets. Is it a case of sour grapes among industry observers or does this point to fissures that could lead to more serious issues later on?
Welcome to the new world
In an ideal situation, food writers visit a restaurant incognito, pay for the meal and then write about it. But not all restaurants are willing to sit around and wait for that to happen, which is why the concept of restaurants hosting free meals for journalists is not new; it is a marketing tool to introduce new menus or concepts to the media, which are not obliged to provide coverage in exchange.
Restaurants embrace online media because many bloggers are young and more likely to cover everything they are invited to. For this reason, like it or not, social media is here to stay, says Edina Hong, co-owner of the Emmanuel Stroobant group.
"There is no good or bad about it. Consumers are exposed to digital content on a daily basis. It is essential for restaurants to see the importance of social media and include it in their marketing. Bloggers are good for my casual restaurants because they target the younger crowd, which prefer modern means of communication."
Restaurateur Beppe de Vito thinks nothing of spending some S$10,000 over the first three months of opening a new eatery, which involves heavy media entertaining - 12 to 15 writers a month.
"It's always been a big part of our marketing efforts, although the restaurant and media landscape has changed drastically over the last five years," he says. "Back then, it was only for the traditional media; now, every person on the street can be "media", so long as they have access to the Internet. The frequency of media entertaining has increased along with it."
But he stops short of paying for reviews, along with the restaurateurs named here. The fear of missing out is another reason why F&B operators have latched on to social media.
"There are clients who want so much online coverage that we are forced to reach out to bloggers," says a public relations consultant who has her share of horror stories about bloggers who take advantage of invitations to turn a free meal into a private party.
"There are also clients who want only social media and not the traditional press," she adds, estimating that on average, a new restaurant can host 50 to 60 journalists from across media platforms.
A veteran PR director from a top hotel here also cites pressure from management to embrace the new media - "especially if your bosses (and their wives, children, friends and neighbours) keep raving about blogs and social media posts about your competitors. It's 10 times worse if your competitors are mentioned but you're not. We have to join the crowd or be accused of not doing our job".
The food-blogging business
How badly do restaurants want to be featured by food bloggers? Enough to pay four-figure sums for a well-known "influencer" to mention them on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, it seems.
No longer content to just accept invitations to hosted meals, bloggers with large followings now charge enough to make for a very profitable sideline or full-time career.
Brad Lau - also known as Ladyironchef and perhaps the best known food blogger with 600,000 followers on Instagram alone - declined to be interviewed for this article, but is known to charge a fee for showing up at a media tasting and more for an actual article.
One F&B operator told The Business Times that it paid him S$3,800 recently to promote its restaurant. It also paid Daniel Ang of DanielFoodDiary (166,000 Instagram followers) S$2,300; Seth Lui (9,965 Instagram followers), charges "between S$1,000 and S$10,000" for advertorials. Maureen Ow, a former journalist who blogs under the moniker Miss Tam Chiak, keeps her fees under S$2,000.
These so-called A-list bloggers command page views of a million or more. Derrick Tan of SGFood on Foot, who gets 70,000 page views, has his fee starting at S$500.
Besides sponsored posts or advertorials, bloggers also make money from advertising. The more page views one gets, the more money there is to be made. In Daniel Ang's case, even though he has kept his day job as a mass communications lecturer, he makes a high four-figure sum a month from advertising, in addition to sponsored posts.
Still, even among the blogging community, there is disagreement over what constitutes professional ethics.
Mr Ang says: "If I did (blogging) full-time, I would find it hard to be objective. Singapore's food companies are also closely related, and if you write a bad review about one restaurant, the likelihood of them being linked to another or a chain is very high. You don't want to be offending your advertisers, so it's a sensitive situation."
Aun Koh of food blog Chubby Hubby fame, claims that he does not accept any invitations for tastings, "because once you do, no matter what anyone says, you owe them something. There's no such thing as a free lunch".
Edsmond Cheong of The Chosen Glutton counters: "When I go to a tasting, if there are more bad things than good things, then I won't write about it." The 25-year-old University of Sheffield student goes for two to three tastings a week.
Aaron Nathanael Ho of Rubbish Eat Rubbish Grow says: "A lot of new bloggers don't know how to appreciate food, and can't tell what's good and what's bad, so it does make you wonder about their motives. I met a blogger once who didn't even know that egg shells are sometimes brown; he thought all eggs came out white!"
The part-time NTU tutor accepts one tasting invitation a week and doesn't shy away from writing negative reviews. "Sometimes the PR companies don't invite me back for more tastings, but it's okay, I just go and pay for the meal myself."
Most bloggers label sponsored posts and advertorials as such, but some don't feel the need to make it unequivocal when they attend invited tastings.
Derrick Tan says: "I don't usually label the tastings, but I tag the articles as media invites. I don't think it's that important to explicitly state it because I know I write objectively."
Ms Ow of Miss Tam Chiak says: "I think we should apply a personal code of ethics to our work. There are some bloggers who think it's free food and so they must write something good about the restaurant."
Mr Ang adds: "It's really a question of ethics. There isn't any regulation, but at the end of the day, your credibility is at stake. If your readers don't agree with the majority of opinions you post, they might stop reading your blog. I think it's a self-regulating industry in that sense."
Even so, a prominent blogger who declines to be named says the scene is a cowboy town, where anything goes, and everybody's a critic. It's a bane to restaurants who have to deal with obscure bloggers who rant about them online, or threaten to shame them if their demands are not met.
This article was first published on 24 July, 2015. -
Eating is very stressful
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nah , what is there to write on ajinomoto restaurants ?
some dont even have a tastebud so what elements do they have to write on food?
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Pay or not to pay?
If dun pay, you have ppl like mr ladyironchef making alot of noise at your place...
Then again, taste is very subjective. what might be nice to some people might not be nice for others, IE: Durian and Truffles...
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i dont visit "taste influencers" blogs
i use community-based review sites/apps like burrple
u get more truthful feedbacks bcos they are submitted by the masses
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nowadays people dont understand what is good food
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who defines what good food is anyway
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I know for certain the citibank food adverts at the back of the sunday life paper is all paid.
Because the writer, everything also say good.
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wun share my top favourite bcos i dont want the places to be more crowded than they already are
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Originally posted by ditzy:
I know for certain the citibank food adverts at the back of the sunday life paper is all paid.
Because the writer, everything also say good.
Well, it's shyttybank
same goes for the DBS indulge food adverts
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Originally posted by FireIce:
wun share my top favourite bcos i dont want the places to be more crowded than they already are
U know, sometimes i feel quite delimma...
1 part of me wanted to share good food, so that everyone can get the enjoy them and be happy. So that the stall owner can have better business...
the other half wanted to keep it to myself so that there wont be a HUGE crowd and the quality wont go down due to too much customer...
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not only not understanding what is good food , many dont even know how to eat
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true. my sis, nice food and yucky food taste just as good to her.
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those are advertorials
paid of course
everything to them is "out of this world"
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where is the best cai png?
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i used to eat at wherever the bloggers promote, but not anymore. sucky...
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You never know if you can trust them because they get stuff for free
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I would love to do this
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.
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If I am a food blogger and resto owners wont pay me for any blog article about them, I will instead eat for free in thier resto for free.
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I loves blog with food promoting.not I trusted them but sometimes when I looking back for address of a restaurant.it helps haha
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Yea i think it also depends on the amount of followers a blog has, lesser known bloggers will most likely get free food as a form of payment
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one man's meat is another's poison
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sometimes i wish i can make a living just by taking pictures of food..