TG4 asked us to create a campaign that would increase visits to their VOD player, promoting homegrown content to an international audience. Part of our idea consisted of creating a new show for the player, hosted by an animated character based on a real TG4 weather girl, which would drive viewers to the best content the player had to offer. To launch this new show, we ran a series of live stunts on TV and seeded them on social. As TG4 owned the TV channel, we had the opportunity to be much more innovative than normal. Our campaign relied heavily on our being able to create content to run during the news; and being allowed to execute stunts live on air.
In our first stunt (Monday) we ‘killed off’ Caitlín Nic Aoidh, the real weather girl – on whom our character was modelled – live on air. On Tuesday, we ran a missing persons report on the news using the real presenters for added authenticity. On Wednesday, our animated character stepped up to present the weather in place of the real Caitlín who was still missing. And on Thursday Caitlín Nic Aoidh returned to confront her digital doppelganger. We feel that our ability to disrupt programming and create 4 highly engaging stunts live on air was only one of the innovative ways we used media in this campaign. On Snapchat we effectively used the beta version of their camera roll functionality to make all of the events unfolding seem real by providing a real time second screen.
On Snapchat we grew TG4’s audience by 196% and had over 296,000 Snapchat views during the week the campaign ran.
On Twitter, we had a reach of over 20 million unique views. One of the video clips from the campaign was featured on news websites and other TV shows around the world, including Huffington Post, Digital Spy, Mashable, Have I Got News For You and BBC Newsnight. With a creative of budget of less than €20k and a paid media budget of only €500, we created a campaign with an earned media value of €2.9 million. This culminated in a return on investment for TG4 of 13,181%.
Helping us introduce a huge global audience to a little known station in the west of Ireland.
http://www.tg4.ie/en/player/home/?pid=5203204078001
