Friday, 16 September 2011
ITV saw 77,000 people play its online play-along game for gameshow Red or Black? during a single episode.
The show, produced by Simon Cowell’s production company Syco, debuted on ITV1 on 3 September. It aired daily for a week, at the end of which the online play-along game had clocked up a total of 374,000 plays.
Red or Black?, fronted by TV presenters Ant and Dec, centred on letting contestants spin a roulette wheel where they had to select either red or black to win £1m. It marks the broadcaster’s first TV show to feature a synchronised online play-along game element, similar to Channel 4’s The Million Pound Drop Live.
The answers of the online players were fed back into the TV show, including details such as which colour a contestant’s home town had voted for.
ITV’s head of entertainment and digital channels Tom Dolan said Red or Black? is a prime example of a successful dual-screen format that viewers want to engage with.
“We’re really encouraged at the levels of real-time interaction,” he said. “Over 370,000 play-alongs, with over 50% of users under 30, is a great result for a brand new show across a single week. This is a relatively new area for us but clearly demonstrates an appetite for this from our users.”
The multi-platform show was sponsored by Domino’s, which included linear TV, online and mobile platforms. Players of the game on ITV.com were encouraged to click through to the brand’s website to order pizzas.
Domino’s sales and marketing director Simon Wallis said, “The play-along game provided us with a fantastic opportunity to drive a deeper engagement with the show’s viewers and, most importantly, drive sales directly from a broadcast sponsorship.”
Dolan said, “We knew that quality calls to action were absolutely essential, and making sure they felt authentic for an audience that might never have tried a play-along before. We had to remind ourselves daily that we were working on a new show, with a type of audience engagement that was new to ITV, and it was a fascinating challenge to integrate the two.”
The integrated partnership with Domino’s is one of several examples of interactive multi-platform sponsorships ITV has trialled with brands. Last month it ran a campaign with Argos across TV soap Emmerdale. This involved TV ads that invited viewers to enter an online competition based on the soap’s content. People had to go to ITV.com/argos to enter for the chance to win £10,000 worth of Argos vouchers.
It has also kick-started trials for interactive online video formats, and will begin talking to agencies about new formats in the coming months. It has trialled a new video-on-demand format that asks viewers questions related to an advertisers’ product. Their responses provides data of product awareness and ad effectiveness, which ITV can then feed back to the advertiser. If the viewer gets the question right they are returned immediately to the TV show.
Channel 4 has already rolled out a full suite of interactive video ad formats, designed to forge closer relationships between its viewers and advertisers.
