OBJECTIVES: To create a targeted interactive tool to bring more viewers to Foxtel and Austar’s Channel [V].
STRATEGY: Build an SMS database to interact with viewers about their favourite music and deepen existing relationships with viewers
RESULTS: 35,000 Channel [V] viewers have registered in the first five weeks of the service being launched.
FOXTEL and Austar’s dedicated youth music station Channel [V] has launched a new service for its viewers to fill a much-needed gap in music television.
“With music television, essentially each video is a program so TV guide liftouts don’t work,” Channel [V] marketing and promotions manager Andrew Valder said.
Always on the lookout for ideas to inspire its tech-savvy 13-24 year-old demographic, the marketing department got their thinking caps on and devised Rover, the cheeky animated representative of [V]’s new SMS service.
Viewers have been invited through ads in the Foxtel magazine and promo spots on the channel to either log on to the [V] Web site or use their mobile phones to register their details, indicating which artists they’re interested in seeing. When a feature on that artist comes on, the viewer receives an SMS message alerting them to the programming at no cost to the viewer.
The service was eight months in development. It was created for [V] by Dload, and was designed to be integrated with the station’s Web site, which has 130,000 registered users.
Valder said in a space where the words “innovative” and “unique” were bandied about so much as to have no meaning, an application such as Rover really upped the ante for marketing to young people.
He said the [V] audience knew exactly what marketers were up to, and unless Rover was offered them value they would just say, “Up your bum”.
Valder was adamant the station would not on-sell the database.
“People say SMS can be expensive at 15 to 20 cents a message, but if you use it in a clever way, there’s no waste,” he said.
With 35,000 registrations, viewers are voting with their mouse.
