- Background
- Objective
- Campaign
- Results
Online sponsorship
ITV wanted an engaging channel to interact with PC users during the Euro 2004 football tournament. Skinkers Communications was commissioned, and it created an animated version of presenter Des Lynam called Desktop Des.
Desktop Des launched in May 2004 and provided pertinent updates surrounding the tournament direct to ITV users’ PCs via a fixed area of ITV's tournament homepage. Skinkers designed an appealing flash animation which linked users to the download page.
"Desktop Des is a fantastic platform for DVLA Personalised Registrations to reach a target audience. This sponsorship helps us to raise awareness of our brand in a creative and amusing way."
Byron Roberts, Head of Marketing at DVLA Personalised Registrations
As well as getting the ITV brand onto the desktop within the context of a permission-based application, this was designed to give a commercial return as a separate revenue stream for ITV Sales. To this end, ITV sold sponsorship of the Skinkers channel to the DVLA.
The desktop channel reflected the DVLA brand and promoted awareness of the DVLA’s personal licence sales. The Desktop Des character had various entrance and exit animations involving licence plates, and the user could invoke further humorous animations from the right-click menu.
The dialogue windows also carried DVLA branding, and the larger windows contained a search field that users could use to poll the DVLA database to check availability of certain number plates.
ITV and Skinkers combined to promote Desktop Des in trade publications such as New Media Age and Revolution as well as the national press - it got two mentions in Metro, for instance. ITV managed to get an on-air plug for the application as well, which resulted in a significant surge in downloads.
Over the entire duration of the campaign, from the launch on 18th May 2004, Desktop Des produced 15,545 absolute installations, 580,524 desktop impressions, 366 messages sent and 34,837 click-throughs, with a 6% click-through rate. Overall, the number of downloads was very respectable for a short-term campaign, and significantly better than various competing applications also based around the tournament.