Masterchef Arabia

The mission

With the new TV due to launch in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding countries in 6 months time, we needed to create some digital assets to support the launch and engage the new audience once the show was on air.

For the new TV show, we were asked to create:

• An engaging responsive website design to house video clips, as well as chef and contestant profiles
• Multilingual capabilities
• Bespoke CMS for the show
• Develop an iPhone app  and Android app, to include live voting

Delicious website design

We took the existing Masterchef website designs by Turquoise Branding, which had been adapted for Arabic, and created a fully responsive website.

Having a mobile-friendly website is critical in a region where phones are the main way of browsing the internet.

The website is integrated with Masterchef Arabia’s Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest accounts to encourage sharing recipes and comments on the show.

The App

The Masterchef Arabia app was created to maximise audience participation with Live Voting and the ability to “predict” who will be eliminated.

The CMS for the app enabled the production team to keep the show front of mind between episodes with timely push notifications which reminds you when episodes are on and allows users to save a calendar reminder.

Native versions for iPhone and Android were created.

English and Arabic

The website and the app we designed from the ground up to be multilingual, with both Arabic and English supported.

Our team are used to working on projects which have an international audience and in particular, working with the Arabic character sets.

We created some very clever CSS which handled the switching of the screen reading from right-to-left for the Arabic content, over to left-to-right for that in English.

Systems integration

The website was developed with a bespoke CMS for Masterchef Arabia, which also pushed content to the iPhone and Android apps. The CMS allows Masterchef Arabia to keep the website and apps up-to-date with the latest news, contestant profiles, episode clips and recipes from the series.

The website CMS controls the app, allowing Masterchef Arabia to control all content from one place. It also reduces time and admin as content can be pushed to the website, app or both.

And so…

It was one of the biggest television productions to be seen in the Middle East and even included a custom-made studio containing the largest MasterChef kitchen in the world.

The website and App were well received by audiences and attracted tens of thousands of hits every day.

Social media results were huge with 30k+ Facebook fans, 5.5k Instagram followers and over 600k YouTube video views.