ITV launches ‘insight and planning tool’ for media planners and buyers

ITV Commercial today announced the findings from its biggest audience insight project to date, ITV LIVES, which looks in detail at the lives and behaviours of the TV viewing population in the UK.

In addition, ITV Commercial also announced the launch of a “unique insight and planning tool” detailing all the findings from the project, which can be accessed by the wider media planning and buying community as a source of additional intelligence into target audiences.

Following the launch of ITV’s rebrand, ITV Commercial unveiled the new insight and planning tool to provide an in-depth look into the habits of the modern viewing population in the UK. It spans all TV audiences exploring and examining their lifestyle, the brands they engage with, as well as their media and technology usage.

The research found that attitudes towards social media, dual screening and new technology, naturally split into four distinct groups. ITV LIVES identifies these groups, revealing new insight into behaviours of the viewing audiences. The four groups or ‘LIVES’ consist of:

• Social LIVES: the smallest and youngest end of the population who are the most sociable, mobile and are always in their connected world. They balance their TV viewing between live TV and catch-up.
• Connected LIVES: the highly networked group who are dealing with young adult life and balance new technology with new responsibilities. TV sits at the heart of this group’’s entertainment with on-demand services adding an extra layer of convenience.
  Busy LIVES: the bulk of middle Britain where the majority are hectic families whose children introduce them to new technologies. TV’s main role in this group is the shared viewing of event TV.
• Traditional LIVES: the biggest group who mainly fall in the older end of the population. Their TV viewing is mostly linear and watched via the main TV set.

As each individual could exhibit different behaviours from each of the four ‘LIVES’ groups, the research went one step further to explore how each of the four groups preferred to engage with advertising. These findings were compared with ITV’s existing communications strategies and incorporated within the planning tool to provide analysis of TV buying audiences.

Further key findings from the research report include:

• Brands are important to all groups, but their brand decision-making process differs.
• Families, rather than younger audiences, tend to be the most ‘teched up’.
• All groups use social media, but they tend to use it in different ways.
• TV is central to people’s lives, regardless of how they watch the content.

“We are delighted to launch our ITV LIVES research and planning tool to enable media buyers to gain further insight into the true behaviours of the nation,” said Glenn Gowen, ITV’s Head of Commercial Research.

“At ITV we know that we can deliver big audiences, but we also know that these audiences are not the same, so we therefore have to understand their lives and what makes them different. For us it was important to have an overview of the entire TV viewing nation, not just ITV viewers, to make the study of value to everyone.”

ITV Commercial worked in partnership with Kantar Media and WORK research on the study, which included a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative methods.