Encouraging viewers to watch paint dry with Ronseal

The Big Idea

In order to gain notoriety and maximum cut-through, many brands have worked with Channel 4 on ad-break takeovers to disrupt viewing and make as much noise as possible. So why not turn that idea on its head? Who says advertising should be loud and brash to catch your attention? On the Friday before Mayday Bank Holiday – a time where the great British public are considering a trip to their local DIY superstore - we decided to create what we lovingly refer to as the ‘world’s most honest ad break’ and give ‘Ronseal One Coat Fence Life’ a chance to do exactly what it says on the tin, by dedicating a whole ad-break to a man painting a fence for 190 seconds. No gimmicks. No special effects. No dialogue. Nothing. Brave or stupid? We weren’t sitting on the fence!

Making it Happen

Luckily, Ronseal have a sense of humour and don’t mind a gentle poke at themselves. We immediately started work with their creative agency, BJL, and discussed how we could further amplify this activity and create buzz around this event advertisement. To kick start the campaign, we created four 10” cryptic teasers which ran across Channel 4, E4, Film 4 and More 4 for four days leading up to the takeover, which simply showed a different garden gnome in each execution and a mysterious voiceover stating things like “You won’t believe your eyes” and “This will get the people on the sofas talking with an appointment to tune in on Friday at 9:10pm. Famous for strong opinions from the contributors, and in order to create talkability, we chose to show the ad during Channel 4’s flagship show ‘Gogglebox’.

In a similar fashion, Ronseal wanted to get the nation talking, and be as honest as possible, by encouraging them to join the conversation on social media using #RonsealAdBreak. To give the stunt that extra Channel 4 magic, we commissioned our in-house creative team, 4Creative, to design and build special Channel 4 blocks to bookend the ad break, using our new channel identity. The blocks were made out of wood which could be painted with the product to tie in with the ad itself. We also used our weekly All 4 newsletter, which is sent to our 14 million registered users, to tease the campaign on the Friday – the first time this has been used for an advertiser. Finally, we agreed to push this activity using our own Channel 4 Twitter feed (which has over 750k followers) and provided an All 4 Home Page Takeover for the day of the campaign. And if that wasn’t enough, in addition to the 190” copy, BJL also created an 11 minute version!

The Results

On the night, the break takeover drew an audience of 3.8m live viewers. All spots from the campaign reached 23.8% of adults. The 11 minute piece of copy was watched online by a further 18,755 views to date, with a 100% completion rate of 32%. We nearly broke the internet! Twitter went into meltdown with a mixture of reactions from viewers who were left stunned, mesmerized and perplexed in equal measure. #RonsealAdBreak trended at the UK top-spot for two hours on the evening of broadcast, a Channel 4 ad break first and continued trending for another four hours. The campaign hashtags #RonsealAdBreak and #DoesExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin achieved a combined Twitter reach of 35 million. Across all social platforms campaign video content generated 648,030 video views. On Twitter alone, the campaign generated 576,008
engagements. 57,600 Twitter users watched the 3-minute-10-second film in its entirety (100% retention).

Channel 4 campaign carried out a further evaluation which surveyed 400 viewers alongside 400 non viewers, and found viewers had a 62% net recall and above average recall with 75%, the adbreak achieved very high scores for originality (75%) and the majority of recallers said they would consider Ronseal after viewing the ad break (57%).