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Huge Ad Campaign For BT Vision As Service Hits The High Street

Huge Ad Campaign For BT Vision As Service Hits The High Street

BT Vision Telecommunications giant BT has unveiled its biggest advertising campaign of the year so far – a multimillion pound national promotion for its IPTV service, BT Vision.

The campaign is led by national TV advertising, kick-started by two new 60-second slots The new ads develop the story of Adam and his partner Jane as they each rush home from work, anticipating their ideal night of TV via BT Vision – be it through Freeview, BT Vision’s broad choice of on-demand content, or a programme stored on the PVR. The ads will make their debut during ITV’s Grease Is The Word on Saturday May 12.

The TV slots are supported by a nation-wide BT Vision poster campaign across billboards and bus sides, including a specially created execution for the Clapham Colossus at Clapham Junction. At 200ft it’s the largest back-lit poster site in Europe.

The above the line campaign incorporates advertisements in national print newspapers and magazines. BT has also substantially revamped the website at www.bt.com/btvision and will be driving a major online campaign including rich media ads featuring on the home pages of MSN, Yahoo! and AOL.

Lib Charlesworth, director of sales and marketing at BT Vision, said: “When people are considering digital TV, the campaign spells out why BT Vision offers the best option – no matter what their mood or viewing occasion. The messaging is underpinned by how easy it is to control how much or how little customers choose to pay for BT Vision.

“This campaign seeks to establish BT Vision, and build a strategic positioning in an increasingly competitive market, drawing on the striking visual identity and generating long-term awareness amongst consumers of BT Vision as ‘entertainment that’s right for me’.”

The company has also announced that BT Vision will now be available in high street stores, with John Lewis and Comet being the initial carriers of the set-top box.

BT Vision is enabled by the V-box, an HD-ready television set-top box which connects to BT Broadband where a customer has a minimum guaranteed line speed of 2mb per second, and offers thousands of hours of on-demand content and the Freeview channels, as well as a PVR which can record up to 80 hours of programming.

The service launched to a sample of users on December 4 last year (see BT Vision Trickles Onto Market Next Month), prior to a wider roll-out. It is best described as a combination of a digital terrestrial television (DTT) service and IPTV (see Long Time Coming – BT’s Vision).

BT is aiming to attract hundreds of thousands of customers by the end of the year and two to three million customers in the medium term.

Recent reports have suggested that the service has attracted just 5,000 customers since it launched in December 2006, although the telecoms giant says that this is entirely in line with expectations.

The investment bank Morgan Stanley previously estimated that 40% of the 5,000 customers are employees of BT (see BT Vision Begins Slowly).

Dan Marks, CEO of BT Vision said: “BT is offering customers something fresh and exciting. BT Vision offers customers choice on their terms: free digital channels, digital video recording, and a huge range of on-demand content – and all without compulsory subscriptions”.

A further announcement from the company said that it had concluded an agreement to supply further on-demand programming with CBS Paramount International TV, the major US network. Vision customers will therefore have access to programming including Sex and The City and Twin Peaks. BT expects to name further content partners in the next few weeks.

Analysts from Ovum said of the ad campaign: “With the launch of this campaign we will now begin to see whether BT can successfully execute a marketing strategy to move the BT brand beyond communications and into the entertainment space. This is already a highly competitive space and will be challenging. But it also shows that convergence is not just a one-way street. Let the battle begin.”

A deluge of similar services has recently washed onto the UK market, with offerings from major players such as the BBC (see BBC Trust Gives iPlayer Final Approval) and ITV (see ITV Invests £20m To Get Its Channels Online), Channel 4 (see Channel 4’s 4oD To Offer Seven Day Catch-Up) and Tiscali (see Tiscali Turns Homechoice Into Tiscali TV), with Freeview Playback set to launch later this year (see Freeview Playback To Be Widely Available By Next Summer).

BT: 0207 469 2337 www.btplc.com

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