Line of Duty Series 5 - BBC Social Media Campaign

  • Rebekah Ellerby

The industry renowned Line of Duty S5 social media campaign, which is held up as a "gold standard" (Head of Social, ITV) and "model campaign" (Radio 1 Producer), won two Lovie awards. The campaign accumulated 24.9m video views across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, beating both Bodyguard and Peaky Blinders S4. Key video pieces included a Line of Duty x Friends parody, a songified Ted Hastings bop, a killer trailer, a 70s Cop Show parody, and the most iconic line of the series. Launched the BBC's largest Facebook Group for fans of Line of Duty, which is used by Facebook as their exemplar brand group to showcase at talks and training. Worked closely with Twitter, Giphy and Facebook to maximise reach organically and with social advertising. A Twitter conversation card ad was the most successful of its kind in the BBC's history, creating genuine discussion around the series' biggest talking point: whether or not Ted Hastings was a 'bent copper'. Enabling and boosting UGC was crucial to creating a sense of community and maximising talkability around the series. Gifs hosted on Giphy were used creatively by fans. UGC that added to the conversation was tactically shared by the BBC One, BBC iPlayer and BBC social accounts. The Facebook Group was a hot pot of fan content creation and was used to create Instagram Stories, as inspiration for memes, and as a social listening tool to gauge what jokes landed best and what themes fans of the series talked most about.