Top Chef Restaurant Promotion

I was browsing through the New York Digital Agencies and came across Avatar New York. They had done an innovative application for Bravo's Top Chef.

Taken from their showcase site:

Objective
Introduction of an online application to generate more interaction on the Bravo ‘Top Chef’ site, connecting viewers and fans with their favorite ‘Top Chef’ contestant’s restaurant picks around the world.

Solution
Top Chef is a popular reality show that airs on the Bravo Network, in which contestants compete in weekly challenges to be crowned America’s favorite Top Chef. With plans to extend the show into two spin offs—Top Chef: Junior and Top Chef: Master—the fan base of this deliciously fun show continues to grow. To facilitate interaction between the Top Chef contestants and their loyal fans, Avatar created a customized application that lets users search the most enviable restaurants chosen by the chefs. Top Chef enthusiasts can filter their search by chef, judge, season, or city. The application features a Google powered mapping system, a section for reading and/or leaving comments, and a comprehensible navigational structure which allows an easy search for all restaurants and cuisines by city.

Results

Traffic to Bravo's Top Chef website increases and the Blogophere raves.

You can check out the application on Season 5 of the Top Chef website. It's a great app for fans of the show who develop strong attachments with specific contestants. The app tracks all contestants from the previous 5 seasons (and the sixth one when it finishes, I presume) so that fans can continue their relationship with their favorite chef long after the season concludes.

There's quite a lot of content on the Top Chef site -- and the applications, games and such are organized according to Seasons. The Restaurant application was tucked quietly away in Season 5. Though its information's probably relevant across the entire show, it can be found only by those fortunate enough to bookmark it last season, or for those lucky enough to know exactly what they're looking for.

As you can see from Games content (alone!) for Season 6, there's a tremendous amount of pre-recorded and "for the fans" content that is archived in the show's website.