Channel 4 viewers take control of Years & Years

The Big Idea

To do this they needed an idea to build excitement and epitomise the image the band had begun creating for themselves, driving reach beyond TV to a worldwide social audience. Cutting through the noise, if you will. A huge part of the band’s appeal is their enigmatic performances, resulting in unique musical experiences for their fans. We needed to create something truly different for them that felt authentic, and most importantly allowed their fans to interact directly with the band they love. We wanted to give them control. To do this we devised an idea that would see the band produce 3 different videos for their current single, ‘Shine’. We would run the video through an entire advertising break and, for the first time ever, allow viewers to choose which version they wished to see on screen in full and in real time by tweeting from three hashtags: #ChooseDark #ChooseLight #ChooseShadow, with the most popular hashtag prompting the on air broadcast to change every 30 seconds. In a nutshell, viewers could curate their own Years & Years ad break!

Making it Happen

We created a bespoke broadcast transmission system for delivering copy in real-time. We also needed to ensure viewers were entertained by what they were seeing and worked alongside The Outfit to produce 3 carefully choreographed videos on the same day, in different settings, which were linked by matching moments every 30 seconds to use as a cross-over point to the next chosen version. To promote the launch, we created a series of teaser ads which aired across C4 & E4 programming, optimising the target audience. The online teasers were viewed in excess of 150,000 times on the band’s social platforms, and an exclusive behind-the-scenes video premiering on MTV’s Snapchat channel garnered a million views in 24 hours.

On July 10th 2015, during the entire first commercial break of Eight out of Ten Cats, history was made. To give the event an even greater presence, the whole broadcast was also streamed directly to a microsite for international viewers to watch, and an interactive digital version of the stunt was created for the Years & Years website to ensure fans had a way of interacting with #ShineTakeControl beyond the live event.

The Results

Viewing figures for ‘Eight Out Of Ten Cats’ were a massive 1.5m with the ad break event itself pulling an even larger audience of 1.55 million, showing that people tuned in specifically to watch #ShineTakeControl. The event trended globally, with 13,800 tweets during the evening which, according to Sysomos, had a reach of over 11.3m people. The band’s website, where the ad was streamed, saw 55,000 unique users globally tuning in to watch live plus 110,000 visits to the site after the event to watch again.

During the week of the event we drove an extra 10,000 Years & Years followers, but most impressively of all we achieved 55,000 sales in week one, becoming the first ‘New Music Friday’ UK Number 1 Album, ever. This outsold the other artists in the top five (Ed Sheeran, James Bay, Sam Smith and Taylor Swift) combined!