Brand-New Reality Check

Santa Barbara TV game-show host Rebecca Brand is living up to her name!

Rebecca, who six years ago began a small business hosting dinner parties and teaching French impressionist oil painting at her home, got an idea to create a reality show, Dinner Party Art Class, with her single students hooking up and dating over a series of 10 half-hour episodes.

So, with borrowed Mac computers, she hired an editor and with the help of four others, she created the show, which aired on the ABC-TV affiliate, KEYT, with sponsorship from Guy DeMangeon, the Berryman, and uber winegrower Bill Foley.

Rebecca, who lives at Hendry’s Beach, then hit all the big TV conferences, including MIPTV in Cannes, and NATPE, garnering reams of press, including a handsome write-up in Variety.

“But, despite all the hoopla, there were no further TV contracts,” she laments. “It was a big goose egg, with $200,000 invested in a show no-one wanted to buy.

However, while in France a YouTube channel manager suggested creating cooking videos, which led to the making of 40 videos and the instant success of her channel, which has had 27 million views since its launch in 2012, and 110,000 subscribers.

Turner Broadcasting’s comedy channel Adult Swim then asked Rebecca, who has three grown children, to produce more comedy after seeing a viral video where she cooked fish tacos with an iron at Santa Barbara harbor. She was then hired for 35 subsequent episodes that aired as Iron Cook and she has now been contracted to host the network’s first-ever game show – a remake of the 1950’s show Dialing for Dollars that starts airing out of the Cartoon Network’s Burbank studios late next month, which is Channel 54 locally on Cox.

Two years ago, entrepreneurial Rebecca hopped on another lucrative trend when YouTube began hiring “influencers” to incorporate their products into their videos, signing with multiples advertising agencies, including Famebit, owned by Google/YouTube.

“I’m told I’m now the most hired ‘influencer’ for product placement in the world,” she says proudly. “Most of my videos are now laced with products paying me for my talents weaving in the products to my lifestyle content.”

From cooking, she has branched out to home and garden, travel, fitness, beauty, fashion, and entertaining, with her videos being picked up by Roku, Apple, and Amazon TV, Android, and 20 other digital platforms, boosting her viewing statistics by 200,000 a month.

From her video product placement, Rebecca has this year launched another company with her three full-time videographers-editors also creating Amazon and Website videos with actors and actresses signed up by her casting company.

“I found that lots of brands wanted to see young millennials using their products and decided to fill the void.”

Next year, Rebecca, a UCLA graduate, will be hosting yet another new show – Travel With Me! French Impressions! – where she invites 40 friends on an 11-day tour of France, with a VIP trip to Paris, Provence, Cannes, and Monte Carlo.

You go, girl.