The Campaign

Two insights around how people select content helped drive our strategy: 1) Desirable content finds its way to connected consumers through their social streams. In a world where digitization and connected devices have made content ubiquitous and limitless, the process of discovery has been flipped on its head: people no longer actively look for content in a relevant set of established content brands – rather, they let relevant content find them in their social streams. 2) Context & its associated emotional state determines the type of content people desire. Planners increasingly realize the power of context for determining choices: where you are and what you do determines what you want. o The power of this insight is the realization that everybody can be targeted with multiple pieces of relevant content if we correctly identify the context they are in, and gear the content towards the associated emotional need.

Creative Execution

ECCE identified e.g. when our target was in discovery-mode in information-heavy contexts like searching for and viewing longer form content on Youtube, they where much more likely to engage with and share science and knowledge content like content from BBC’s Brian Cox explaining the Universe. ECCE showed us that when our target were commuting they were more likely to be in an emotional state of escape, looking to distract their mind from the thought of heading to work with wildlife content. When our target was moving across their social media universe and thus wanting to connect with other people, they would be receptive to content of some of the larger-than-life personalities of BBC Earth like (David Attenborough sharing a moment with his favourite creature or the stars of Life Below Zero battling life in Alaska) in order to serve that need for personal connection.

We reached our campaign goal swimmingly after three months only: BBC Earth became the #1 factual channel in Asia (Kantar Media)– mission accomplished! Viewing stats revealed that our new approach to video, replacing the single big launch trailer with content proliferation, really succeeded in delivering the right pieces of content to the right people in the right contexts: Our 162 mini-moments of emotion were viewed no fewer than 5.8MM times – that’s on average 36k organic views per video. We outperformed by 300% Facebook’s and Google’s benchmarks for engagement rates, sharablity of videos and average views per video. o Our videos achieved an average CTR of 6.3%, and 827,457 social clicks. o The most engaging video achieved an extraordinary 27% engagement rate.

The development of the ECCE – emotional content connection engine – used technology to allows us to redefine the way we target audiences shifting from demographics and predictable segments to focusing targeting on our audiences emotional state of mind. Truly different and better way which is what Spikes is all about.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Content proliferation: create 162 videos to deliver the right piece of content in the right context for the right emotional state. This new approach replaced the traditional single big trailer with which a channel would have been launched in the broadcast world. By creating no fewer than 162 mini moments of emotion, we could cover the complete range of our audience’s emotional needs, and thus connect with them with greater relevance. We built the AI powered ECCE’ (emotional content connection engine) which allowed us to deliver these mini-moments of emotion’ in three specific contexts & emotional states where our target was most receptive to them: when they wanted to escape, when they wanted to connect, and when they wanted to learn & discover.