ITV Studios Drama Festival: Product Showcase
Client: ITV Stakeholder: Ruth Berry, Managing Director, ITV Studios (Global Distribution) Role: Project Manager
Description:
On Wednesday 21st February, in the basement of London's Victoria House, our brand new Drama Festival took 250 international ITV Studios buyers right into the heart of our drama content with a debut live experience, turning the traditional screening experience on its head with phenomenal results.
Taking a revolutionary approach to the traditional screening formats we allowed guests to connect with our content on an experiential level.
The audience were then surrounded in a 35m 180 projection wall of custom-crafted content in the main theatre auditorium. Back-to-back drama titles were featured, incorporating innovative creative delivery and sound engineering in amongst exclusive access footage and talent.
Stakeholder Feedback:
"I am still buzzing from the drama festival this afternoon, which was just such a brilliant event - we go from strength to strength and continue to impress our clients by raising the bar on everything we do. Blown away! I never doubted you for a minute, but you surpassed all expectations, the turn out was incredible and the feedback very brag worthy! Anything from - 'wow, its like being at the Cannes Film Festival and how people sell movies", to "this makes MIPTV redundant" or "you could teach BBCWW a thing or two on presentation." Clients were undeniable immersed and impressed and we had the swagger we deserve with such a fantastic slate. World class. I was sitting in the front row feeling incredibly proud to be leading such a great business represented in such a professional and market leading way, so thank you for making that possible. A great team effort and very much appreciated."
Ruth Berry, Managing Director, ITV Studios (Global Distribution)
Guests arrived and were greeted by supersized artwork which led them past never seen before period costumes as featured on Liv Tyler’s character Lady Fitzwilliam in Harlots. An exhibition made up of 1,200m of wooden handmade frames with exclusive artwork, press quotes and literary adaptations transformed the basement. A soundscape led the guests through the gallery and into the main auditorium.
The afternoon was hosted by Michael Idato - journalist and senior writer at The Morning Herald - and began with a preview and insights from the experts behind Vanity Fair, followed by a first look at new drama, Cleaning Up, and concluded with insights from the masterminds behind Harlots.
Guests were lead into a soho house-styled drama lounge, with interactive iPads & bluetooth headphones showcasing exclusive footage. Speckled with quirky cinema-scoffing delights; mini nachos, pizzas and cheese toasties all served in theatrical ways. The sessions re-commenced with the golden age of foreign language drama and the finale boasted an impactful world premiere preview of War of the Worlds.
The immersive reception tailed the day and invited guests to explore the bespoke curated zones. An inspector led investigations as guests indulged in blood splattered canapés and examined the crime and autopsy rooms. Spaces were filled with bespoke materials from our ITV Studios dramas and actors transformed the experience. Finally, a custom-built photography studio with specialist technology inserted guests into the live productions.
With a modest budget for this scale of production, this experience aimed to entice a targeted audience of 200 international content buyers into a mystery location and deliver an unexpected live production. We set out to stand out from competing events and position ourselves as a global market leader for premium drama content and we took risks to ensure that our content was delivered in an impressive and impactful way.
We pushed both technical and creative boundaries throughout the experience, challenging our suppliers’ limits and testing the boundaries of innovation. As part of the wider integrated marketing campaign to amplify the presence of ITV Studios Global Entertainment, the experience was tactfully curated to highlight and generate talkability around key emerging titles, and provide an interactive environment to facilitate future sales leads for the business.
The project demanded a collaborative approach and saw teams from across the business work cohesively with external experts to achieve the birth of a brand new festival.
3,000m of cabling were used for the custom-built projection wall that wrapped guests in 12,720,000 pixels of content. The scale of delivery was colossal and all of our specialist suppliers were stretched and challenged; this included our award-winning creative agency, who maintained that the project pushed their boundaries far beyond the content delivery norms.
Through a really successful communications campaign, we achieved a 47.5% increase from our targeted total guest numbers and were 10.5% above our targeted amount of clients. Sales representatives have fed back the successes they have had as a result of their client’s attending the experience:
- Key title, Vanity Fair, sold for the highest ever fee for a drama on NRK, Norway - an uplift of 103% per hour.
- MNET (who were keen on Vanity Fair before the Drama Festival) have now picked it up post attending the event.
- Telefonica confirmed they were taking Vanity Fair after the Drama festival.
- And the general feedback confirmed that the Drama Festival definitely helped in showing our extensive upcoming projects.
The original aspiration for this inaugural event was for an invited audience of 200 buyers and production personnel; we actually achieved an attendance of 250 buyers on the day and saw an increase in attendance of producers, writers and executives taking the final attendance to 320.
The ITV Studios brand was catapulted into a world class bracket with clients on the day commentating that the event had raised the bar for competing events. The event not only helped kick start sales conversations and helped sell ‘Vanity Fair’ to new territories, buyers were still talking about its effectiveness at MIPTV the following month; asking for ‘save the date’ information so they could plan their buyers schedules in advance.
Although not an initial aim, the experience generated trade press attention from TBI and Deadline. Both of which were positive reviews.