Giada De Laurentiis Added to Today Lineup, Starts Own Line of Food, Bakeware - Page 2

Now, being a Giada fan from the beginning, will I mindlessly run out and buy her stuff? No. It's really not as if the world needs one more bottle of olive oil lining the shelves. I'm sure Giada's name alone insures some credibility, and therefore sales, but you just never know, especially when it comes to celebrity products. The article doesn't mention price points, either, so I'll simply have to wait, taste and see.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Sometimes Giada cooks on Today, sometimes she doesn't. So will there be any cross-promotion of her products on the show? Will she use her own products on her own Food Network shows? Because one of the more interesting points of the article is that Giada's products, including her books, are separate from the Food Network.

Food Network has approached De Laurentiis to jointly launch products, but she has chosen to go it alone (she already has three cookbooks in addition to the ongoing Barilla relationship) because star and network haven't been able to align on terms of a deal, she says.

“I came in at a time where Food Network didn't have those ties with a publisher and others,” De Laurentiis says. “They were doing food programming, and that was it.”

Luckily, both parties admit the mutual benefits of their relationship - the more popular one gets, the more it helps the other - and so it sounds like their relationship isn't affected negatively. Which is good, because I like Giada in the grocery store, even more so on my bookshelf, but most of all I like her where I got to know her first: on my TV.

Article Author: Don Baiocchi

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