ITV's Knitted Ad Break: see how ITV celebrated their Christmas jumper theme!

ITV teamed up with six major brands to ‘knit the ad break’ during our annual charity fundraiser, Text Santa, in order to celebrate their Christmas jumper theme.

ITV Creative, our in-house creative team, carefully recreated each brand's beautiful ads in woolly form. BT, British Gas, Nationwide, DFS, Amazon Prime and Dreams took part in the ad takeover in a single ad break during the charity appeal. 

The ad was teased in the previous ad break with a call to action through a bespoke ITV end bumper showing a lady busy knitting away.

The unique commercial break at 9.15pm was introduced by our bespoke knitted ITV branded bumper with a voice over explaining the break and each break has a knitted Text Santa Blipvert.

The campaign was amplified in social media using the hashtag #knittedadbreak and further augmented on ITV, ITV Media and Text Santa’s social channels. The entire knitted ad break was uploaded onto ITV’s YouTube channel immediately after airing in order to take advantage of the high traffic that would soon follow.

The campaign took inspiration from the award-winning, world's very first Lego break, celebrating The Lego Movie release, which saw advertisers’ ads recreated in Lego.

• Text Santa was watched by an average of 3.9m viewers across 3 hours
• The break maintained the live audience of the programme and attracted a whopping 4m viewers
• 100% of the live programme audience were retained for the ad-break!
• +12% Knitted Ad Break engagement score vs. average of any other break during Text Santa
• Text Santa was the most tweeted about show of the day with 8.7k mentions
• 69% agree the ad break “stood out from others I’ve seen” and 66% said: “it was better than a typical ad break”
• According to neuroscience -
  1. The long-term memory encoding was 10% higher with the knitted version of the ad at the key branding moments.
  2. Likability of the knitted version was stronger
  3. Strong brain response data echoed in very positive conscious responses to the knitted ads

Source: BARB/AdvantEdge
LiveView dial test (96 viewers) + YouGov survey (365 viewers) 
Individuals, Live+VOSDAL except third fact which is Live only
Kantar Media InstarSocial + Pulsar Social Monitoring
ITV/Neuro-Insight research study