Channel 4 asked Bite to attract new audiences in the 16-25 age group to its youth brand, T4 and to reinvigorate and broaden its appeal.
Bite implemented a highly effective seeding programme to make sure that exclusive snippets from the shows made their way to tier one online outlets. These clips were vital in encouraging people to make an “appointment to view”. Amusing footage was packaged-up to appeal to bloggers, forum coordinators, picture editors on celebrity news sites, online video editors on national newspaper websites and traditional print media.
Once people had discovered the T4 content, we wanted to encourage viewers to declare their love by interacting with T4 directly. A dedicated social networking recruitment drive was thus implemented giving access to unseen footage. Bite concentrated on Twitter and YouTube, which both specialise in constant, short and punchy updates and can house rich media content such as videos.
The next part of Bite’s campaign was to contribute to the conversations already taking place, provoking discussion, adding transmission details and linking to the T4 website. Using an online monitoring tool, Bite was able to track which buzzwords were being mentioned in association with T4 and therefore which conversations should be targeted.
The final element was to get viewers off their sofas and into the brand. We wanted to find a way to get them intrinsically involved in the making of the programmes. Working with Princess Productions, Bite helped create and promote three new online properties exclusive to T4: The iCarpet—viewers posing questions to celebrities; The T4 Widget—a downloadable widget bringing the best of T4 to Facebook, Bebo and MySpace and Talk to T4—an online chat function with messages appearing on screen live on air. Bite promoted the assets by seeding content to key blogs, fan sites and forums.
Over six months, the campaign achieved 41 positive social media articles, 5 pieces of national print coverage and 16 pieces of consumer lifestyle coverage with a combined total reach of 167,218,947. More than 800 people subscribed to the YouTube channel and the videos were watched over 118,000 times. In excess of 100 threads and posts were infiltrated throughout the monitoring and response component of the campaign.
Overall, the campaign lead to 6.3m page views of T4.com and spikes of peak activity correlate directly to the appearance of social media articles, forum postings and activity on social networking sites.
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