Barb Briefing

Barb Briefing: Veriça Djurdjevic

17 June 2021

Barb’S 360° AUDIENCE VIEW INFORMS WINDOWING STRATEGY

It’s A Sin is one of Channel 4’s biggest successes of 2021. It is also a really interesting case study in terms of how we at Channel 4 used Barb data and insights to inform an innovative windowing strategy going forward.

Let’s start at the beginning with the story of what we would expect from a normal drama, under normal transmission circumstances. So, once upon a time we would put the drama out, obviously with lots of marketing and promotion, and there would be excitement and build up to the first transmission on linear TV. That build up would generally be quite a good indicator of the series’ success.

Then in the normal run of things, what would happen is that the live viewing that we would see week after week would gradually decline, and we would expect to see lots of catch up taking its place. Overall though, that means that a drama series like It’s A Sin would typically suffer from a bit of a loss of momentum as one went through the series.

This brings two challenges; it is hard for the broadcaster to keep or extend the audience, and it is hard for us to put a clear value on the audience for our advertisers.

With this in mind we thought a little bit differently with the release of It’s A Sin. We followed a very deliberate strategy to make this a landmark piece of PSB programming. We took a different approach to the window and how we were going to release the drama. What we did was run episode one live, and we also then allowed — indeed promoted — box-set previewing on All4.

What was fascinating about this was that we saw a completely different set of viewing results than those that we might expect.

This approach allowed us to extend and build the audience as well as optimising the momentum of the show. As the weeks went by, what we saw from the 360 degree Barb data was that almost 4 million viewers watched episode five on All4 well before it ever went live on TV. in fact, two-thirds of the episode 5 audience watched it before transmission date, and 88% of these pre-broadcast viewers watched on All4 via the big screen in the corner of the room.

So why did we see this growth across the life of this campaign in this program? Well, there was a fantastically strong marketing campaign that supported it and promoted it externally off the platform. We also then built word of mouth, which helped to create the momentum to carry the show through. And of course, it directly played and spoke to the trend for bingeing content via video on demand players.

As a result of this approach, we also derived some very clear benefits in terms of the Barb data and the insight that it brought for us.

The first, is we can see exactly who watched the show when they watched it and indeed where they watched it, which helps me helps inform future decisions about the release patterns of upcoming shows.

The second thing is we can now put a total value on the program as a whole. So not just the live and consolidated picture but also the binge viewing. And that means we can get the reach of the total audience, and speak to advertisers about that for future shows.

This show had an extraordinary impact in the real world, as well as in terms of viewing. We saw record-breaking levels of demand for HIV testing, as well as the biggest ever fundraising months for leading HIV and AIDS supporting charities. It’s A Sin was a really powerful piece of PSB programming that had incredible viewing success and a real impact on society, which of course is the channel living up to its purpose of creating change through entertainment.

We’re committed to taking these learnings and others that we’re deriving from Barb data to feed into our test-and-learn approach for our future programme windows, and how we treat them.

Veriça Djurdjevic, Chief Revenue Officer, Channel 4