How Do You Blend Marketing and Cooking Into One Interview Show?

 
Little Black Book covers our new episode with the people who cook up Eat In or Dine Out.
 

---

 
HATCH is back in the kitchen for season two of its lively and candid video series, ‘Eat In or Dine Out’, which features top creative voices from across the marketing and advertising industry.

Each episode brings a marketing leader into the kitchen of Jennifer Harrington, HATCH’s founder and CEO, to tackle a perennial dilemma: build an in-house team or partner with an outside agency?

For episode three of season two, Jennifer flipped the script and sits down with the team behind the show itself: Maddie Harrington, creative operations manager and agency producer for ‘Eat In or Dine Out’, and Victoria Griggs, executive producer for the show and co-founder and creative director of Sweeter The Juice Films, a Boston-based production studio and HATCH’s partner for the series.

The result is a look at what it takes to produce unscripted marketing content and what makes content work.

“It’s hard to know what people are going to talk about when they come on screen,” said Maddie. “It’s not scripted, so it’s been a learning experience being behind the scenes and watching the conversation unfold.”

Victoria described the tabletop production puzzle of shooting in a working kitchen and noted the harder ask: getting camera-shy marketing guests to perform for the lens.

The trio also dug into a topic on every CMO’s mind: what kind of content still lands. Victoria said she has grown increasingly focused on the generational divide in how audiences respond, noting that gen z gravitates toward user-generated, unscripted-feeling content over the polished, “bells and whistles” advertising that came before it. She pointed to a stretch of viral fashion marketing stunts that looked spontaneous but were tightly planned as an example of what she calls the “uncanny valley of advertising.”

“What people want is the story behind the actual person,” Victoria said.

Maddie and Victoria pointed to longer-form branded content, including work from Krispy Kreme and agency High Dive’s campaign for KFC, as proof that giving a brand story room to breathe builds a different kind of connection than a traditional commercial does.

“A story feels very different than being sold,” Victoria said. “I think longer-form content helps people create that connection.”

Jennifer credited the pair with giving the show its distinct feel on LinkedIn, where the series has built a following for standing out in a feed dominated by traditional business content.

“You can’t read your way to understanding where advertising is going,” Harrington said. “You have to sit with people who see it differently than you do, and some of them are going to be half your age. Maddie and Victoria push back on me constantly, and that
is the whole point of building a team that doesn’t sound like one person.”

This episode of Eat In or Dine Out is now available on HATCH’s YouTube channel and website. Season two is in production, with new episodes and guests to be announced.

This article originally appeared in Little Black Book