Poke has finger in Oliver’s pie

Poke is taking a butcher’s at Jamie Oliver’s website as the celebrity chef aims for a more mature on-line image that gets away from his ‘cheeky cockney’ persona.

The group is reviewing all aspects of the site’s content, functionality and customer management, with a view to launching an entirely refreshed product in spring 2004. An interim website, which brings the popular Jamie Oliver diary element on to the front page, will be posted before Christmas.

The current website is full of phrases like ‘Nice bit of clobber’ and ‘What a doughnut’. But, according to Poke creative director Nik Roope, Oliver is keen to move on from the ‘media caricature’ that ‘reached fever pitch a couple of years ago’ and present himself in a more genuine light.

‘It’s about showing the real him and how he reacts to things in his real life,’ says Roope. ‘The revamp is concerned with speaking through action, rather than language and description.’

A greater emphasis will be put on interacting with the ‘community’ that use the site regularly, he adds.

The success of Oliver’s restaurant venture, Fifteen, has helped to him to move his image on from that with which he made his name. Tessa Graham, part of Oliver’s development team, says Poke was appointed because of its ’empathy with Jamie as a brand’.

The group won the work after nine-way pitch in October.