How ITV attracted 2 million new viewers

Having invested £165m in the launch of streaming service ITVX, ITV had some ambitious targets to hit on route to doubling its monthly active users and streaming hours by 2026.

Achieving these goals required a deeper level of audience insight. First the team tapped into YouGov’s proprietary UK panel of 2.5 million members, including in-depth profiling of 320,000 individuals.

Using tech from software company InfoSum, ITV was able to match 160,000 YouGov members with users of its previous ITV Hub service. This data was extrapolated by modelling to the remainder of ITV’s 33 million registered users, segmenting the entire first-party dataset.

This work helped the marketers identify a target market of 23 million people – dubbed ‘mainstreamers’ – who only watched ITV for its flagship content.

The statistics were integrated into ITV’s customer data platform Flex. The broadcaster reports Flex played a “transformative role” in the campaign, accelerating the time taken to activate first-party audiences from three months to three minutes. The market insight helped ITV become 69% better at predicting which users would upgrade to its premium subscription.

ITV used its detailed audience attributes to target show-specific messaging, causing conversion-to-viewing rates to more than double for its ITVX push notification campaign. Likewise, an ITVX email campaign nearly doubled its conversion rate, from 6.5% to 12.5%.

Prompted awareness of ITVX rose from 36% to 92% among the mainstreamers cohort, while streaming hours for this group grew 94% year on year. Since launch, monthly ITVX users increased by 2 million – including 1.5 million new registrations – success which helped ITV scoop the 2023 Marketing Week Award for Data-Driven Marketing.