2020’s ITV Palooza - our annual commercial and programming showcase - swapped out the red carpet for a star-studded online show for our advertising partners. ITV’s commercial bosses Kelly Williams and Simon Daglish joined CEO Carolyn McCall and Director of Television Kevin Lygo to reveal our upcoming plans. Taking the theme of ‘re-ignition’ we shared new programming and commercial initiatives to reignite television, business and lift the nation's spirit across 2021.
7 ways ITV can help you reignite your business in 2021
1) Planet V
One of TV’s many strengths has always been transparency. As the delivery and distribution of television transitions from broadcast to IP - through our on demand platforms, connected TVs or set-top boxes - we’re committed to maintaining that transparency in TV’s digital future.
Last year we announced the launch of Planet V: a fully transparent, addressable advertising platform built specifically for television, using our 1st party, registered data. The real benefit is the self-service functionality. As we like to say, Planet V is about “your advertising in your hands”, with the ability for you to plan and book your own campaigns 24/7. We’re thrilled to reveal that we already have over 200 active customer users, fully trained, using their live self-service accounts, and we’d love you to join them.
2) InfoSum
We’ve recently signed a deal with InfoSum to be Planet V’s data management partner. Infosum is a data management start-up with some very smart tech that allows us to match ITV’s 1st party data with other 1st party data sources, in a secure and compliant data ‘bunker’. We’ve been so impressed with their technology, and so committed to the partnership, that we’ve taken a financial stake in their most recent round of funding.
For the first time, we can securely merge your data with ITV’s for smarter targeting and measurement across our premium video inventory. Together, we now have the capability to build new and more powerful audience segments, at scale and unique to each advertiser. We’re keen to test and learn with as many partners as possible.
3) Join us for adventures in data!
Just as we’ve invested in our digital and data capabilities, so we’ve also developed our customer insight and planning credentials. What’s interesting is when these worlds come together. For example...
As Covid spread, ITV was a trusted source of information for a news-hungry nation. Our analysis of viewing data highlighted a group of viewers who watched more news bulletins and briefings than the average viewer, and we called them ‘Covid Cautious’. If you’re a travel brand, it’s possible to exclude these Covid Cautious customers, as they may not feel quite ready to fly or plan their holidays just yet. Similarly, they may be more open to hearing about pharmaceutical brands.
It’s a great example of how we’re becoming smarter as we think about audience segmentation. In 2021 we're setting up several work streams to help you take advantage of the opportunities data and technology can create in both VOD and linear. We’re seeking advertising partners who want to experiment with us next year and explore…
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Even more ways to segment our audience, just like the ‘Covid Cautious’
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The short term impact of TV on metrics like search queries
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The impact of ad quality on effectiveness
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How to prove the sales impact of TV without costly and time consuming econometrics
4) 2021's summer of love
As the sunshine returns to our lives next summer, so will the Euros and Love Island. After the uncertainty of 2020, we can be sure of one thing: that young audiences are going to be glued to the TV next summer - and your brand can become entwined with some of our biggest partnerships.
Phrases such as ‘mugged-off’, ‘100% my type on paper’ and ‘pied’ have become part of our everyday vernacular thanks to Love Island. And when a TV show can literally shape the English language,you know it’s going to be a powerful marketing tool! We’re looking for brand partners and would love to see how we can bring your brand into the beating heart of this unique show, with deeper levels of integration that go well beyond broadcast.
And as football finally leaves the subs bench to get back on the pitch, we’re excited to bring the Euros back to the nation from June 2021 - especially as the UK will be hosting 11 games. The tournament will deliver massive audiences, with many games seeing over 10m live viewers tuning in, and some matches exceeding 20m. It’ll be the advertising event of the year, full of opportunities to get seen by emotionally charged fans with a love for the game, so we’re launching a creative challenge in partnership with creative effectiveness experts System 1.
Using System 1’s unique ratings platform, we’re offering the advertiser with the most emotionally engaging ad in next year’s Euros, a free spot in the final. We want more advertising to be remembered in years to come. In short, this is a call to make your brand a part of culture next year.
5) Big Bike Ride
Reconnect with your local high street and communities with our newly launched initiative: ‘The Big Bike Ride’. We've been planning with 25 of the UK’s biggest city authorities, to persuade them to close their streets to make way for the biggest mass participation event in 2021.
In the middle of August, we plan to get over 1 million people on their bikes, to cycle together around their local city in a carnival atmosphere. There’ll be everything from lycra-clad racers, to tandems and trusty old rust buckets out there, as families reconnect with their communities and bring some much-needed joy and fun to their streets. We’re looking for partners to help make this happen, so can we connect YOUR brand to this powerful event?
6) Ad funded content
Advertiser Funded Content (or AFC) is becoming more and more popular as a way for our partners to communicate their message. But whilst AFC is an important mixture of entertainment and brand communications, we believe it works best when it's integrated into a broader communication across ITV.
A great example of this is our ‘Pick for Britain’ campaign - in partnership with Waitrose, Wonderhood Studios and DEFRA - which took the form of a national recruitment campaign followed by an hour-long documentary showing how the nation ‘picked for Britain’ in its hour of need. Within only three weeks, we’d inspired 847,000 people to visit the campaign website and pledge to join the new land army to make sure fruit and veg reached our plates across the UK.
We're open to AFC like never before, and we’re looking for brave, ambitious and creative companies that want to co-create and produce fantastic campaigns. We’d love to talk to you, so please get in touch.
7) ITV Backing Business
We took our ‘Re-ignition’ theme for this year’s Palooza from the Backing Business initiative we launched in the summer, which aims to support business in its recovery and growth. It began life as an online platform of 25 webinars which shared insights into consumer behaviour, category predictions, creative effectiveness and cultural research.
It’s been particularly exciting to see a number of partners take our ‘ITV Backing Business’ brand into their on-screen B2B campaigns too. For example, we’ve recently partnered with NatWest’s business banking unit, as they launched a competition for small businesses to win advertising creative from agency Pablo. Plus, we’re working with eBay as they show how their services help keep SMEs trading, and how it’s real people that make Britain’s small businesses special.
If you have B2B products or services that support British business, then we’d love to bring you into ITV Backing Business too.
Got a question?
If you want to hear more about our transformative partnerships, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with itvcommercial@itv.com
