Rubbertopia

Chris Quigley

There was a time I loved Jamie Oliver.  Then I hated him.  Now I'm loving him again.  I'm loving him because he's invented "viral food".  This is Jamie's idea of spreading recipes around Rotherham by getting people to "passing on" recipes to friends.

In the first programme Jamie boldly laid out his plans by drawing out his his nice viral food theory in which within 10 turns of "passing on" all 200,000 people across Rotherham would have been reached.  Simple.

Or not so simple as it turned out in practice.  As a viral theory geek it was clear why his theory isn't working as well (or simply) as he first thought.  These are:

- Make it simple to engage with: Jamie's recipes are too complicated to get to grips with and pass on.  The first 2 recipes that he tried to get people to pass on were meat balls and salmon.  Meatballs may sound simple - in practice they're a pig to make and easily fall apart.  Spag Bol would have been a much simpler option.

- Make it simple to pass it on: Worse than a complex idea, is bad execution of the "viral agent" itself.  In this case the viral agent was a recipe card - or in fact a piece of paper with a badly laid out recipe on it (as one of the Rotherhamites pointed out!)  A Sainsbury recipe card kinda format would have been much better.  Nicely compact and easy to pass on . . .

- Target influencers: First off Jamie's approach to finding people to "pass it on" was to cast his net wide for anyone at all to create the viral effect - which largely consisted of socially awkward single mothers.  Rather than picking at random, a clever approach would have been to pick community influencers - e.g. pub staff, cornershop workers etc.  People who are connected and likely to more easily create his ideal food viral.