UKTV Play reveals innovative off-air campaign and product update to boost growth

Wednesday 15 June 2016

Love Your Thing campaign positions TV on demand service UKTV Play as the entertainment brand that serves the eclectic viewing tastes of Britain

The national heavyweight digital outdoor campaign includes award-winning data-informed advertising

UKTV Play will run the worlds first dynamic, social TV Chatterbot recommendation engine

Overhaul of UKTV Play user experience

Leading entertainment company, UKTV, has announced the first major marketing campaign for its fast-growing on demand TV brand, UKTV Play.

The heavyweight on- and off-air Love Your Thing campaign will celebrate the diversity of TV that Britain holds dear, from cutting-edge comedy to historical documentary, ghostly adventures to period drama. The campaign recognises the passion that exists around certain types of programming, and affectionately dubs this peoples thing. Whatever a viewers thing is, UKTV Play loves and celebrates it, in a world where on demand TV is globally homogenised.

Launching this week, the integrated campaign comprises of heavyweight on-air advertising, national digital outdoor marketing, social and publicity executions, and an award-winning location-based initiative, being triggered by specific weather conditions, traffic and time.

Off-air digital support will include the worlds first social TV recommendation engine, run via an intuitive Facebook Messenger Chatterbot, due to be rolled out later this month.

Commenting on the campaign, UKTVs Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Zo Clapp said,

UKTV Play is the bright and exciting TV on demand service for Britain, and whats more, its totally free. Its already UKTVs fastest growing brand so were going big and bold with our first innovative off-air marketing. With this campaign were binning the sad old notion of a TV guilty pleasure, and celebrating the nations favourite pastime. Whether your thing is natural history, real crime, period drama or classic comedy, UKTV Play will be with you.

The brief for the campaign was to position UKTV Play as an energetic and disruptive entertainment product brand that people across the country identify with as one that represents them, and the entertainment they love. UKTV has worked with advertising agency Antidote to produce the off-air campaign creative, which centres on the breadth and eclecticism of UKTV Plays content offering, and celebrates the fact everyone has their own TV thing theyre in to. It presents the service as being here to serve the nations individual tastes and needs, by heroing programmes and genres in a fresh way and creating an emotional connection with the audience.

Antidotes Creative Director, Teddy Keen, said, UKTV Play has something the other players dont - an unapologetic appreciation of the individual when it comes to TV. In that way Love Your Thing is a simple idea that comes straight from the heart of the brand and reminds us all that its okay to watch the stuff we love, no matter what that is.

Media buying and planning has been managed by award-winning media agency PHD Rocket, part of the Omnicon Group.

The dynamic off-air assets will roll out as a national heavyweight digital outdoor campaign. The campaign features £250,000 worth of real-time data-informed advertising, which UKTV won as first prize in Talons inaugural Smarter as Standard competition, for providing the best creative use of contextual digital out of home advertising as part of a wider campaign. The outdoor ads will react and update when triggered, dependent on location, environment and when specific conditions are met. Spots in locations such as high streets, shopping malls, trains and rail stations will be informed by intelligent traffic, weather and location data feeds. Antidote will use OpenLoop to update the creative throughout the campaign live period as required.

The off-air will be supported on-air by a new conceptual brand promo, genre-specific clip-based promos and BEOPS.

The social media campaign, which includes the world-first TV recommendation Chatterbot, created and managed by agency Social Life. Activity will centre on the hashtag #Loveyourthing.

UKTV Play s new promo UKTV Play s new promo

New UKTV Play To coincide with the marketing push, UKTV is also revealing significant updates to its UKTV Play interface. Based on extensive A/B testing, the revamped service has been designed to make viewers experience more enjoyable and personalised. The fresh new look and feel features a more focused approach to finding favourite programmes through a better organised homepage, higher-quality programme images and the introduction of easy-to-view genre listings. In addition the new programme guide makes it easy to find on demand programmes from the TV schedules. The new look UKTV Play will launch on PC today, with other platforms to follow.

UKTV Plays General Manager Emma Boston commented, UKTV Play has a vast and diverse catalogue of quality shows, which caters for everyones thing, whether thats a love of drama or obsession with true crime. We wanted to reward users with an even better UKTV Play, and rigorous A/B testing has allowed us to develop a brilliant new streamlined interface to ensure visitors can find something great to watch in seconds. The new look site is set against an aesthetic, clean white background to give it a premium feel that mirrors the quality of our content. Our research shows that once people come in to use UKTV Play, theyre very likely to keep coming back, so its crucial their experience is first class every time.

Latest figures show UKTV Play achieved a record-breaking 81% year-on-year growth for Q1 2016, with the service also recently celebrating one million app downloads. UKTV Play has this year been shortlisted for Best Digital Video Platform/Service in the Broadcast Digital Awards for the second year running, alongside established market play

LINK:	https://corporate.uktv.co.uk/news/article/uktv-play-reveals-innovative...
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