How Meredith built Allrecipes into a multichannel success, courtesy of A Founder's Notebook:

When designing each experience, we look to the unique strength of each medium.

Web provides a high degree of interactivity and utility: A keyboard and mouse allow the consumer to actively share their experiences through text. The large screen allows them to engage and to interact with the content through drag and drop functionality, and allows many items to be present on the page at the same time.

Mobile is all about mobility and constant connectivity: We take advantage of the likelihood that the home cook is most likely on-the-go or in-store when using their phone, so we are very much focused on helping them quickly find and share dinner solutions. The phone’s geolocation technology pinpoints the cook’s location so we can deliver hyper-local grocery offers that match their location and preferred retail outlet. We also take advantage of touch, voice and motion to allow them to enhance the brand experience. Mobile devices are also more likely to be a personal vs. shared device, so we can pay attention to their past behaviours to deliver a more personalized experience uniquely tailored to their interests and needs.

Print is an experience where cooks are most likely interested in having us curate the experience for them: The team pays close attention to the trends and behaviours we are seeing play out on the web to inform the editorial framework and focus of each issue. They are able to create features that marry our most popular recipes alongside hidden gems that might easily be missed through common search or browse behaviours.