Reading Time: < 1 minute Powering ITV’s understanding of their audience to help leverage commercial growth.
A problem a lot of big brands have is that they need to appeal to a large cross-section of the public whilst still driving revenue from specific groups. As the UK’s most loved commercial broadcaster, ITV needed real, robust and believable human insight about their viewers that could support their commercial team. They were looking to understand more about their audiences to shape their programming, advertising and in particular their watch-on-demand service. Their brief was to create a community where members wanted to stick around, aiming for a particularly dynamic look & feel to attract and retain younger members. They turned to us and the ex-plor platform.
We built an insight community, The ITV Village. Our community is home to 10,000 members with coverage across viewers and non-viewers alike. Millennial viewers are a key audience demographic for growth for ITV, but one who can typically be hard to engage in online communities and are also the lightest viewers of linear TV. When designing the look & feel for the community, our in-house design team created a ‘reactive’ set up for 16-24’s, which gives a local, dynamic feel to the community’s landing page by reflecting weather conditions wherever they are. We’re currently working to integrate WhatsApp as a direct channel of communication with younger Village members, enabling them to share ‘in the moment’ insights using a platform that’s already always at their fingertips.
ITV’s Commercial Team has leveraged the community to map out purchase journeys and behaviour, advertising engagement and impact. All of which is hosted via the ITV Media website, providing insight access to up-to-date insights for Commercial partners. Integration of ITV Hub viewing data into our community has allowed sampling for campaign effectiveness studies based on actual, not claimed, exposure to VOD ad campaigns, an approach which has now been used to evidence brand uplift across over 20 client campaigns delivered through the Hub.
“It’s an extremely valuable business tool for getting closer to our audience, used by all departments - ultimately enabling quicker business decisions." Neil Mortenson, ITV
The Village has supported new launches such as The Masked Singer and Planet Child and provided crucial insight for flagship shows such as I’m A Celebrity, Love Island and The X Factor (with ‘in the moment’ activities providing an instantaneous viewer reaction, as shows air). It has also been an important component of helping ITV to test its own marketing campaigns – assisting in the development of the ITV ident campaign, testing the language used around subscription video services, and developing social purpose campaigns like Eat Them To Defeat Them and Britain Get Talking.
ITV’s appetite for innovation has allowed us to collaboratively develop a market-leading toolkit to support audience understanding. This includes everything from implicit response techniques to facial coding, biometrics and passive data collection as well as tried and trusted, traditional claimed methodologies such as dial tests and focus groups.
