www.bbc.co.uk/iPlayer
The launch of BBC iPlayer in January 2008 was one of the most high profile campaign of the year for the BBC and has been hailed a success throughout the industry with the product winning New Product of the Year and The Grand Prix at this year's Marketing Effectiveness Awards.
Where the ATL campaign looked to tell people about the benefit of never having to miss out on your favourite BBC programmes again, the challenge online was to actually get people to experience and engage with the technology and ease of use to bring the benefit of on demand TV to life in the context of their online lives.
Agency Republic's solution was to build a dynamic player that pulls in BBC content from the last seven days into spaces where people are discussing and reviewing TV content. This new format was the first short form player of its type and allowed the BBC to broker ground breaking syndication deals with sites such as the Telegraph to place the content directly where viewers were reading about last night’s television. Now rather than just reading about last night's Panorama consumers could click straight through and actually WATCH the episode that was being discussed, seamlessly dramatising the direct benefit of iPlayer as a catch up service in a way a traditional advertising model never could.
The launch of BBC iPlayer was particularly challenging from a communications point of view as the product was completely new technology for most of the audience. Even so the campaign ran for three months (Jan – March '08) and achieved particularly impressive results with a CTR of up to 1.31%, with a 26% expansion rate (Tango Zebra) and 56% of people who viewed the creative felt more likely to click through to the site (Dynamic Logic). In fact a huge 69% of people who viewed our advertising said that it made BBC iPlayer much more appealing to them, with 87% of people clearly attributing the communications to BBC iPlayer.