From Online To Offline: How We Helped Saturday! Attract An Audience From The Internet

TV channel “Saturday!” decided to expand its TV audience at the expense of Internet users. Together with the channel’s marketers, we started attracting new viewers. We launched a personalized advertising campaign on the network, increasing the channel share by 12%. We talk about how we managed to “lure” people from the Internet to watch TV and how Platforma coped with a new task for itself.

A Task

“Saturday!” is an entertainment channel for girls and their men. It was launched a year ago by the creators of the popular Friday! Channel. Net “Saturdays!” is based on series and reality TV, and famous bloggers became the faces of the new project: Klava Koka, Masha Minogarova, Marina Fedunkiv, Stas Kruglitsky, Alexey Zhidkovsky, and others. One of the primary tasks that the channel team set for itself was to attract the Internet audience to television viewing.

Solution

To achieve their goals, “Saturday!” attracted Platforma specialists. The technological capabilities of our company make it possible to cover users of broadband Internet access from Rostelecom when they connect to the operator’s wifi network at home.

We have developed the “Saturday!” advertising campaign for the channel with unique targeting and personalization. Users saw banners not in the office or public places but at home. It is technically possible to turn on the TV immediately after watching the ad—hired Quiet Media to insert banner ads into traffic.

Mechanics

The campaign took place throughout Russia in September-October 2021. Its target audience was women from 18 to 44 years old with IPTV. Multi-format and full-screen banners were used for advertising with the call “Look right now!”.

The campaign started with an advertisement for the TV series Bones, and after that, Added announcements of the TV series Wild Angel and House M.D. showed Banners to users when these series were on “Saturday!”. Having met an advertisement on the Internet and immediately turned on the TV on this channel, the user saw exactly the advertised series and not something else from Saturdays! Program.

Results

To evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, we used end-to-end analytics at all levels. Through a partnership with multimedia platform Wink, a digital TV operator for 7 million households, we were able to compare how many potential viewers are at home (using home Internet) and ready to turn on the TV right at the moment. We also managed to assess which part of them is the target audience of the TV channel, and then analyze how many people who saw the advertisement for “Saturday!” turned on the channel after that.

The campaign reached 3 million people. Every fifth person who saw the banner turned on the TV channel. Of these, 24% are entirely new audiences that have not watched the channel before. In addition, “Saturday!” began to watch more actively on weekends.

The progressive growth of the channel’s Share began during the advertising campaign and continued after it ended. The channel’s Share increased by 12% from August to December 2021 (Source: Mediascope, TV Index, Russia 100+, channel “Subbota,” Zh 18-45, 01.11-31.12.2021 vs. 01.08-31.08.2021, Share).

The advertising campaign for the TV channel “Subbota!” was successful due to several components:

• Advertising on the Internet was situational and thematic; we offered people who are at home to turn on the TV at the moment and watch their favorite series;
• We used end-to-end analytics between Internet use and TV viewing. We could unambiguously determine whether a user switched from the Internet to a TV channel, watched the broadcast or not.

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