Most people are familiar with the world’s biggest car show, but with streaming services steadily taking market share from linear TV, it became a challenge to get the audience to tune in to the newest season of Top Gear on the relatively unknown channel BBC Brit. Through strategic influencer collaboration and solid coverage in both traditional and social media, the show became one of the highest rated on BBC Brit for April.
BACKGROUND
Numbers from SSB (Statistics Norway) reveal that only half of Norway’s population watches linear TV on an average day. Concurrently, statistics from Kantar TNS shows that Top Gears target audience, men under 40, watches less TV overall. Our strategy then became to push the best clips and wildest stunts on other platforms to get them to turn on their TVs at the right time.
GOAL
Make the target audience aware and interested in the new season, and make sure that both the channel and timeslot of the show was clearly communicated, to make it easy for them to tune in to the show.
EXECUTION
We set out to find the platform with the best odds to reach Top Gear’s target audience. According to Ipsos, Instagram has the most users between 18- and 39-year-olds, where 75 percent uses the platform daily. So, we decided to focus on Instagram, and we initiated a partnership with the influencer couple Henrik and Liva Ingebrigsten, who shared unique content about the series to their audiences. The majority of Henrik’s followers are male, which matched the target audience very well. Simultaneously BBC wanted to reach young women, which is where Liva hit the bullseye. The couple became an excellent duo who advertised for the show in a creative and genuine fashion.
The strategy involved challenging their respective audiences to interact with different Instagram Stories by sharing their favorite cars, best driving experiences and of course their dream car. To get through on social media it is essential that the content comes across as believable and authentic. To weave clips from the episode into the more personal content was determinant.
To get coverage in the wider media landscape we also sent out a detailed press release about the show, including quotes from the hosts, and sending interesting clips every week of the season to relevant media.
RESULT
The influencer collaboration was a definitive success and led to great engagement from their followers. Many of them also shared their own stories related to the episodes. Together, the Instagram posts had a combined reach of 500.000. According to Rivaliq the average engagement for a post is 1,42 percent. Our campaign had an engagement rate of 4,2 percent, which shows that we succeeded in creating good and relevant content.
We also got great coverage in traditional media channels, through interviews with the hosts, as well as good utilization of picture- and video material. The new season got coverage on VG, TV2 Broom, Dagbladet, Nettavisen and Bil24. This resulted in a combined reach of over 4,2 million, and every article included both the channel name and timeslot for the episodes. The ratings held up throughout the whole season and resulted in great results for the new season of Top Gear.
