Foxtel: driving reach beyond its own subscriber base

Men under 45 who follow pop culture, sport and home entertainment run several streaming subscriptions at once, and they are selective about which ones keep earning their place. Foxtel had put the Prime Video app on its set-top box, so its own catalogue now sat alongside Prime Video’s exclusive programmes, popular films and characters, in one place. The men most likely to care about that were outside the NewsCorp audience Foxtel could reach on its own.

Strange Bedfellows put Basketball Forever and Super Hero Hype in the same campaign

The idea was Strange Bedfellows: characters from entirely different genres and worlds put together, a dramatic or serious character next to a comedic or fantastical one. The contrast was the hook. It was built to spark curiosity and make a viewer reconsider the variety of what they could be watching.

Thirteen pieces of content ran across eight publishers, chosen to reach readers outside NewsCorp’s titles. Basketball Forever crossed sports icons with action heroes, and Super Hero Hype put characters from different universes together for comic fans. Boss Hunting blended dramatic storylines with unexpected comedic twists for drama and entertainment fans, while Coming Soon went to the golden age of Australian TV for local ones. The other four each found their own way in: pop culture pairings on Culture Feed, festival-inspired themes on Music Feeds for music and entertainment lovers, home entertainment worked into lifestyle content on For the Home, and relatable social scenarios on Where to Australia. Every piece was customised for that publisher’s own audience, so one idea arrived eight different ways.

Going back to readers who had engaged once lifted the view rate by 20%

Readers who had engaged once got follow-up content matched to what they had watched, and view-to-impression rates rose by 20%. Matching content to what a person had chosen to watch kept them watching, which is the sharpest read the campaign returned.

Over 35,000 social engagements came out of the work in total, and social video peaked at a view-to-impression rate of 62%.

The reach came from titles Foxtel does not own

Eight publishers with those readers put the Prime Video integration in front of them, in the places they were reading anyway, reading about basketball, comics, music and the home.

This one counted engagements and view rates. It never measured what a viewer thought about Foxtel before or after, and it was not built to.