BritBox

The challenge

BritBox is a subscription streaming service, housing the largest selection of British boxsets, films and documentaries. Looking to launch their product in South Africa, BritBox wanted to drive awareness, consideration and free trial sign-ups amongst a heavy streaming, TV-intent audience.

In a crowded space with global competitors already well established in the market, Croud were tasked with generating awareness and intent, across key target audiences to showcase the best of British content. The challenge would continue through maintaining and optimising this performance in the months post-launch.

The strategy

Croud’s Programmatic and Strategy & Planning teams worked closely together to understand the target audience ahead of creating the strategy, leaning on GWI data and Google’s DV360 planning tool for this analysis. This included understanding location, interests, where users spent their time, and the platforms they used to discover new products. From this insight, video was highlighted as a key format for product discovery and education, and the best route to reach users across their heavily used platforms.

We used YouTube as a key platform for generating ongoing awareness, along with Masthead for high bursts to align with other offline and digital channels pushing in those periods. Video was a key driver of reach and engagement. It was launched across a target sitelist of British and South African publishers in order to reach users whilst they were consuming British content, or similar genres via contextual targeting, along with audience targeting to reach UK travellers and heavy streamers.

Finally, we developed our display strategy away from HTML5 and GIF formats, and towards streaming technology, which loads creatives instantly into display units. This proved to be an efficient and effective method of delivering video assets within display ad units, and could closely align with other content that was live across channels.

The results

Since launch, video has held a firm placement in our strategy for BritBox, largely due to the impact of the channel’s performance that was established from the outset.

YouTube activity proved to have a significant impact on our audience, with brand lift survey results showing a 38% relative lift in consideration, which was an increase of 113% month on month. Furthermore, Masthead activity through launch benefitted from wider offline and online hypes, eventually holding a 300% stronger conversion-rate at launch versus other formats that were in rotation. Finally, moving our display strategy to streamed video display drastically improved our creative performance, driving a 25% increase in click-through-rate versus standard banners, alongside a 27% reduction in cost-per-acquisition across remarketing.