ITV Be Research

ITV Be is a new channel that ITV have added as part of their institution that was put in place to broadcast channels that focused on the female audience, with this shown through the programming and also the extensive advertising campaign. ITV had to create another cohesive marketing campaign alike with how they marketed the relatively new channel ITV Encore, though ITV Be is a free-to-view channel, thus meaning it had to depict ITV’s ethos due to them being a commercial broadcaster. They needed to focus on image within their advertising and this is due to the fact that advertisement will be concurrent within the channel, as well as the fact that females are being aimed at through the advertisements because the programming focuses on them – meaning that stereotypes are also important within the ITV Be advertising.

ITV Be was advertised in the same fundamental way as ITV Encore, showing a cohesive marketing campaign due to the way in which they are consistent across the entire ITV brand. However, the concurrent aspect for ITV Be is the fact that they are aiming at a young demographic female audience and this is connoted through their advertising, with a predominant focus upon digital advertising, as young audiences will conventionally use media in order to extract information. This depicts that ITV Be placed an integral importance upon advertising their brand towards a specific audience in a way that they would definitely see it, with YouTube clips and social media creating a ‘hype’ about the channel, as well as several television adverts shown throughout the flagship ITV channel to engage the audience with the channel.

Digital Methods

Digital Methods

The focus was placed upon digital methods of advertising because of the fact that a younger demographic audience would typically become an active audience by extracting information from the use of social media and web 2.0. The television adverts for ITV Be were very effective and this is due to the fact that they were shown on the flagship ITV channel, meaning that people who are already loyal to the ITV brand will move over to the new channel that is part of the institution. ITV Be use their stereotypes within their advertising on social media and this is demonstrated through the pink colour scheme that is shown within their website, as well as their advertising and also colours on their Twitter page. Although this is very stereotypical, it is entirely effective in representing that this channel is being aimed at a young female audience, even without the programming being shown, with the colour bright a vibrant pink to highlight the female audience because conventionally they will be drawn to the consistent colour scheme across the entire ITV Be brand.

Digital Methods

The Only Way is Essex was an extremely successful flagship show that received very high ratings for ITV 2, but due to the fact that ITV Be needed a factor that would effectively stand-out for the audience, ITV decided to move this flagship show to the new channel – in order to depict this is the most important aspect of the new channel. Media synergy is shown within the products as well as the simple information about the channel launch and then also the mantra for the channel of ‘life worth sharing’. The synergy is represented through links to lots of social networking features to allow the young audience that is aimed at the primarily see of the information about the channel, with ‘#ITVBe’ connoted as well because this relates to the success of ‘#TOWIE’, which was one of the most integral social media aspects for ITV because it allowed a young demographic of audience to subsequently get involved within the channel – so ITV wanted to continue this trend. Television advertisements not only included the main information about the channel like the logo, time that the channel will be launched and then the channel number, but also a website in which the audience can navigate towards so that they can find out more information. This depicts that web 2.0 was a prevalent factor for ITV for the new channel because of the fact that young people will see all of the new information by using new media technology – with this allowing a young demographic to see the advertising, but the use of stereotypes mean that a female audience will be enticed towards the brand.

Brand Identity

All of these adverts were consistent with each other in a number of ways and this is something that is also very important, as creating a brand identity will make sure that the audience become synonymous with the ITV logo and with the logo of the new channel. The colour scheme and logo of the ITV Be channel uses a pink colour which demonstrates the female audience as I have aforementioned because the pink colour indicates gender played a fundamental part in advertisements. Appearing as bright and vibrant is integral for ITV Be, with the name of the channel itself indicating that the audience has the opportunity to be themselves and it makes them feel like a valued audience – hence aiming at the psychographic audience of aspirers due to the programming of flagship reality television celebrities and then explorers as they seek individualism.

Ideas for Inclusion

We see ITV Be as a very powerful figure for our own channel because it is a new channel which means that I have been exposed to all of the types of advertisements that have been very effective because I am totally aware about the information of the channel itself. However, we will be subverting from aiming towards one specific gender as we want our audience to be a masss audience and therefore signalling our brand towards both male and female audiences will be most effective for our own brand, though ITV Be helped us to understand the importance of stereotypes within branding. We also want to use web 2.0 with the website but then also synergy by including website links on our newspaper advert because this simply allows the audience to find our more information for themselves by simply promoting the identity of a new channel. We were able to learn that young demographic audience see web 2.0 as absolutely pivotal because they will extract the information from the internet in order to subsequently be engaged within the brand identity of the channel and this is something that we will look to follow also with our combination of advertising.