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The Personalised Program Guide

Helping ITV beat streaming giants at their own personalisation game to win younger audiences

CHALLENGE

Disney, Netflix and Amazon spend more than £38bn combined annually in content commissioning, dwarfing ITV’s £1.1bn. With such fierce competition, the war was on to win younger audiences and light TV viewers who flock to digital subscription TV services. ITV needed to beat them at their own game, and we needed to find a way to do it.

IDEA

Netflix personalises recommendations but only on their channels and only based on Netflix programs already viewed. Disney+ boasts a range of content in advertising but can overwhelm viewers with choice paralysis. Our idea took TV viewing data in all forms. By digitising BARB viewer segments using TV signals on the web and uploading ITV’s CRM and viewing data, we created digital advertising with personalised ITV program recommendations built in. Using programmatic display and social video we delivered these messages dynamically, to solve the problem of what to watch before viewers reached The Hub.

RESULTS

We beat the big players at their own personal recommendations game by being smart with advertising and data, to deliver 24% incremental monthly active users to ITV Hub.