Challenge
Our task was to increase and sustain viewing for the channel’s Red Carpet Season.
The Red Carpet parades are known in the industry as ‘the party before the party’. We saw this as an apt metaphor for the campaign we were trying to create. Research had shown that anticipation for the red carpet events was building from weeks in advance. Celebrity and fashion blogs started to heat up and specialist providers cranked up content offerings to capture and satisfy demand for gossip, whilst social networks started to buzz with arrangements for the big nights themselves as we got closer to the events.
Solution
As an authority on A-List celebrities, E! Entertainment are untouchable and there was no good reason that we shouldn’t be an equal part of the build up to the event as part of the event itself. We saw this as a huge opportunity.
To provide a memorable red carpet experience for all, we built a Facebook App that would pull on a user’s profile pictures to combine live action we’d filmed in our London studio with Hollywood red carpet archive to deliver a personalised red carpet experience for all of our celebrity fan Facebook users. On playing the video the user would appear in it, as would the friends they interacted with most on Facebook. The video was then published in news feeds and also served into the news feeds of friends.
To ensure the video gained momentum amongst the right audience we worked with celebrity bloggers, specialist websites and US celebrity, Ryan Seacrest through E! News. We increased reach and engagement by distributing a non personalised version of the video through relevant players as content, therefore removing the need to download the app. Paid upweights were planned to flow with the levels of buzz in the social sphere.
Results
- The channel had an increase of 69% more viewers across Red Carpet events in January and February compared to the same period in 2010
- Female viewers saw an uplift of 64% reach in versus the same two months last year
- We received 410,767 views of the video, achieving a phenomenal click rate of 3.25% and contributing to a 20% increase in new fans to the E! Entertainment Facebook experience – which now commands a community of 106,000 members (up from 88,835).
- 15,000 people downloaded the app