ITV Studios Fall Festival: Debut Virtual Experience
Client: ITV Stakeholders: Adrian Last, Chief Marketing Officer, ITV Studios Role: Project Manager, Digital Product Build & Execution
Description:
From 14th September to 2nd October, ITV Studios launched a cutting-edge extension of their award-winning Festival brand; the ‘ITV Studios Fall Festival’. A customer focused initiative designed to continue to promote ITV Studios priority content through the delivery of a premium and bespoke virtual experience for clients.
Stakeholder Feedback:
“The ITV experiences team pulled together an outstanding fall festival for us - not only was produced brilliantly under extremely challenging conditions, the fact that it was the first event of its kind on the market made a huge impact and helped position the studios position as innovative, creative and forward thinking.”
Julian Bellamy, Managing Director, ITV Studios
“ITV's Experiences and Marketing teams proved their mettle for innovation with the 2020 Fall Festival, a platform which was expansive, intimate and extremely successful for us and with our clients. For ITV packed a one-two commercial punch of brand-building and sales results delivering a vanguard sales/marketing solution in a challenging global environment”
Augustus Dulgaro, EVP, Distribution, Asia Pacific, ITV Studios
“ITV's Fall Festival was leaps ahead of the market, and the platform and events were the envy of our competitors. The team behind creating and delivering a platform solution from scratch in seven weeks that allowed ITV's content to be highlighted to an audience proved a huge success.”
Greg Johnson, EVP, Distribution, EMEA and Americas, ITV Studios
“The ITV Studios team took 6 months of learnings from virtual events during the pandemic, mixed that with our goal of highly ambitious, noisy global marketing, and were fast and first to market with the Fall Festival. In a crowded marketplace competing with thousands of hours of tv series, this nailed the aim and then some. Branding it as a tangible event with a name helped us get in the press nearly every day for 3 months, our Sales team completed multiple agreements from the event, and the whole industry saw ITV Studios as a dynamic, ambitious, forward-thinking, customer-focused business.”
Adrian Last, Chief Marketing Officer, ITV Studios
“MIPCOM has been the epicentre of bringing people and content together since this business began and it took foresight, huge creativity & strategic planning to replace that experience for ITV Studios and our clients; way ahead of the curve of the rest of the industry. Our Fall Festival showed our producers that we can innovate while the world is in crisis and it gave our clients a personal space to talk and view content in a new, effective way.”
Julie Meldal-Johnsen, EVP, Global Content, ITV Studios
Due to the global impact and restrictions imposed by Covid-19, ITV Studios made the difficult decision not to attend MIPCOM, the largest B2B event in the annual TV calendar. This swift and decisive action, taken several months prior to MIPCOM's organisers announcing it would be forced to move online, put us ahead of the curve.
We quickly conceptualised a digital solution that enabled ITV Studios to carry out business as usual at this critical time of year and beat the whole market to deliver an unforgettable customer experience that would garner the attention of the global industry and drive crucial sales and revenue to the distribution business.
Tasked with saving 75% of our usual campaign spend, the strategy was to continue to build our brand profile and reputation as a creative leader within the global market space, whilst still providing full tools, analytics and performance metrics to manage ROI and sales attribution during this time.
Using state of the art technology, the aim was to provide a digitally intuitive environment that would host a range of activations, including quality webinars and panels that would cut through zoom fatigue and deliver a premium broadcast-quality experience for clients.
We needed to provide the sales team with access to the same tools they would ordinarily have in a physical environment; the ability to host 121 meetings that enabled broadcast-quality content screening and the functionality to download pitch decks and catalogues.
Working across the ITV Studios business and building on the success of the established Festival brand, the launch of the ‘ITV Studios Fall Festival’ aimed to cut through the noise of competition with a busy schedule of premium, multi-genre activity built around commercial and content priorities in order to drive important sales conversations.
Bringing together a total of 5,478 international content buyers and producers, the Festival provided guests from 12 different countries with front row seats to the best and latest showcase of multi-genre content from the ITV Studios family catalogue of nearly 9,000 hours of programming.
Built on a white-label technology platform, our buyers enjoyed a premium screening environment, housing both live and pre-recorded events. Complemented by 33x virtual meeting rooms, each one with market-leading integrated technology that provided real-time face to face conversations with our sales teams and broadcast-quality streamed content. An intuitive and interactive 360 environment opened up further opportunities to promote our content in an engaging way to our captive audience.
At MIPCOM, our clients would normally visit our ITV Studios House to meet with their sales lead, enjoy hospitality and entertainment and become immersed in our content. We rebuilt the house in a digital 360 environment to provide familiarity in an uncertain time, and importantly recreate the in-person human experience they were used to from the brand.
The client journey began in an immersive, interactive, emotive and impressive space, which incorporated multiple downloadable and interactive catalogues for each content genre and embedded brand new promotional videos as key touch points.
The 360 environment led to a premium digital screening room, where live sessions were streamed in a style and design that replicated our usual in person events. We pushed creative boundaries to deliver a different audience view to the regular video calls, producing a curved screen and reflective floor design that was engaging, flexible and premium.
The space hosted a roster of high profile talent and showcased exclusive, broadcast-quality screenings, including a live Q&A facility to enable clients to interact in real time with talent, no matter where they were in the world. Copious last minute travel & safety complications were overcome in order to give our clients access to never-seen-before insights and clients could access all of this on-demand content post-event. Instant analytics were available post-session enabling the sales team to send targeted follow-up emails to their clients.
In order to provide our international sales and content teams with the tools to facilitate meetings, we built 33x virtual meeting rooms with an integrated media player and a 24hr multi-territory scheduling system, which catered for varying time zones and meant that teams were able to automatically generate and send branded, personalised email invitations to their clients.
The fully secure meeting rooms delivered broadcast quality streaming directly from the source of multiple content hosting systems via complex API integrations and content management systems. We developed both a client-view and host-view to service the differing needs and priorities of the end-user and built a fully bespoke 24hr support portal for use across all territories.
Each year, the MIPCOM market sees exhibitors travel from all over the world to attend meetings to sell their upcoming pipeline. We were the first of the industry to formally confirm plans to create our own digital product as an alternative to attending MIPCOM and paved the way for many to follow. This bold move generated the desired talkability and buzz around the priority titles, which in turn led to the 2nd highest revenue year for the Global Distribution business to date and saw ITV Studios rank in 2nd position in the annual Broadcast Distribution survey, which is reflective of the respect earned.
An extremely successful communications campaign ensured the Festival was a sell out against audience targets; hosting a total of 5,478 clients across the period on the platform - almost 14 times higher than our highest MIPCOM attendance figure!
Our catalogue views were on par with YOY figures, whilst targeted promotional video views reached 2,476 and digital interactions reached 7,176. Live screening attendance reached 1,439 (an 141.8% uplift YOY), and consolidated session views reached 2,596, with over 767 hours of content watched.
The number of sales meetings grew by 137% YOY and we saw a 373.6% uplift in actual time spent meeting with clients.
The carbon footprint saving was significant with 128.414 carbon tonnes saved from 433,282 less air miles and 3.4 carbon tonnes saved by cutting 6715.6 miles worth of car travel.
As a result of the campaign, the ITV Studios brand was yet again catapulted into a world class bracket, with clients throughout the month commenting that the experience had set the bar for competitors. The festival not only helped drive sales conversations, but buyers and stakeholders were still talking about its effectiveness into the following months. So much so, we have commissioned three more digital festivals off the back of its success.