ITV Joins BBC To Boost Interactive Ad Effectiveness
ITV Sales has joined forces with BBC Broadcast and interactive media research company iBurbia to promote interactive TV commercials, offering to demonstrate ways to make the medium more effective and convey its business benefits to creative agencies.
The three companies have already approached London’s top ten agencies with offers of help and demonstrations on making their iTV campaigns work harder. The joint road show will also explain how creative boundaries can be pushed by interactive executions in order to enhance brands.
ITV currently runs more than 20 interactive campaigns every month, with many different products and brand categories employing the technology. The latest push to increase the effectiveness of campaigns is being made after ITV Sales recognised that, while more advertisers were investing in interactive TV, the iTV ads that were being produced could achieve more for advertisers.
Commenting on the effectiveness drive, Peter Birch, head of interactive sales at ITV said: “I am conscious that the real potential of interactivity is, in many cases, still to be realized. I suspect this is largely due to interactivity still being viewed by some as being about technology rather than looking at ways this new technology can provide creative solutions.”
BBC Broadcast will bring its experience in creating interactive advertising to the mix, having won awards with its Honda IMA campaign and created numerous other executions.
Christian Ruland, creative director at BBC Broadcast said: “We aim to create interactive commercials that deliver a deeper and immersive brand experience. Research conducted after the Honda IMA campaign aired found that there was ‘massively increased message recall among interactors as opposed to viewers who had only watched the linear ad’.”
He added: “In many cases the purpose of an interactive ad should go beyond pure data capture and should achieve other tangible results such as message recall.”
The use of interactive advertising has risen sharply in recent years, with December 2004 seeing a particular spike in interest from viewers, leading to some advertisers being innundated with requests for information or product samples.
According to data from iTV specialists Press Red, a surge in the popularity of interactive TV advertisements over the Christmas period led to a campaign for Grolsch lager being pulled from broadcast after only three days as the offer of a free branded beer glass attracted an unprecedented response from consumers (see Interactive Ads See Surge In Popularity Over Christmas).
Elsewhere, BSkyB has attempted to foster growth in the medium, running a competition for the best executed and most innovative interactive campaign last year with a £250,000 jackpot (see Sky Boosts iTV Advertising With £250k Prize).
Sky currently runs the most iTV ads of any broadcaster, having witnessed an explosion in the medium’s popularity. There were a total of 17 interactive commercials run by Sky in 2000, compared with more than 520 campaigns in 2004, demonstrating the medium’s rapidly accelerating growth (see Sky Unveils Interactive Advertising Insight).
BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk iBurbia: 020 8747 4592 www.iburbia.co.uk ITV: 020 7843 8000 www.itv.com
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