ITV, the UK commercial broadcaster, is working on a new metric – spontaneous brand consideration – and on building out its direct-to-consumer business.

Rufus Radcliffe, ITV’s chief marketing officer, identified two particular roles the marketing function has to meet.

“We need to get people to watch our stuff and to spend time with us,” he told Marketing Week.

“What we then want to do is convert those viewing moments into transactional relationships moving forward.”

He sees a potential chain of events, whereby getting people to spend time with ITV can lead on to the offer of a more personalised service on ITV Hub, its BVOD service, an upgrade to subscribe to ITV Hub Plus and, further down the road, a subscription to SVOD service BritBox.

“But we are only going to do that if you’ve got them landing in your real estate in the first place,” he pointed out.

Successful programmes like Love Island and The X Factor have helped in that regard, while ‘More Than TV’ brand advertising (accompanied by a consumer magazine) has been running since January, highlighting the stories the broadcaster has told which have helped shape culture.

The next step is to get “light” viewers to stick around for longer – and that is where the new metric comes in.

“In terms of repositioning ITV, particularly among light viewers, whether they would spontaneously consider you as a brand when they watch TV feels like a really simple metric about whether you are changing people’s attitudes about you and your brand,” Radcliffe explained.

“What’s important is we come up with a figure the organisation understands that doesn’t fluctuate wildly from one minute to the next because if that is the case it’s not a robust metric that you’re looking at,” he said, “but it is a figure that is at the heart of what we’re trying to do at ITV.”

The new metric, based on a series of indexed and weighted questions, is yet to be made public, but since tracking began the figure “has gone up really quite significantly”, he added.

Sourced from Marketing Week; additional content by WARC staff