How Channel 4 is “letting loose” with its marketing

In the wake of Meta announcing it was ending all its fact-checking services, Channel 4 sent an ad van outside the tech platform’s UK headquarters, with the slogan, “We fact-check the Zuck out of our news”. The stunt carried on a strong tradition of Channel 4 marketing, which has often found new, innovative and exciting ways of connecting with audiences and presenting itself in a way that distinguishes it from its competitors.

PMA’s Editorial Manager, Harry Lock, spoke with Channel 4’s Chief Marketing Officer, Katie Jackson about the ploy, how it was developed, and what the broadcaster hoped to achieve. They also discussed how to market public service media to young audiences, what working with content creators can do, and what ‘digital first’ means for marketing teams.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Harry Lock: Let’s start with the recent stunt from Channel 4 – is stunt the right word? – Can you talk to me about that process from the Meta announcement to then you doing that?

Katie Jackson: We have called it a stunt. And it was a very fast turnaround. And in truth, it’s not something that we sat down across the organisation to discuss when the Meta announcement came out. And it was actually a product of something quite different, which was an initiative that I had introduced to my teams last year, with the somewhat cheesy title of ‘What If?’ And the thinking behind it was to go, “We’re a creatively driven organisation, we’re an innovative organisation, and yet I want to see a little more behaviour around trying and experimenting in ways that we don’t necessarily do enough of.”

Read more: BBC & Channel 4: The future of the UK’s public service media

I received an email into my inbox from one of the creative directors in 4Creative titled, ‘What if we …’. My first thought, of course, was “Hurrah, someone’s listened and they’re engaged in an initiative,” which I’m really delighted about. And I opened up the email and I was presented with the proof of concept for what ultimately turned out to be the ad van that we ran past Meta’s offices. And the creative director in question had pitched it to me saying, “Listen, we’re an altogether different British public service broadcaster. We have an incredibly highly trusted news proposition. Everyone will have seen the latest report that Channel 4 News, I think, is now second most trusted news source in the UK after the BBC, which is something we’re incredibly proud of. There is a legitimate argument here for us to be going out and reminding our viewers and the British public on the value of trusted journalism. And mightn’t we do that in a slightly cheeky way by crafting some kind of copy line that references the Meta announcement.”

That’s how it was born. When I opened up my email and saw it, I thought it was brilliant. And of course, speed is of the essence. So very quickly [I] then engaged various other stakeholders saying, “Listen, I think this is a really strong idea. I would like to move forward with it because it feels like it represents our values.” So I think I received the email at 11.20am on Thursday, and we were live by 9am on Friday, which was excellent.

HL: I think it’s a really good example as well of marketing public media values where you can be creative with it. It doesn’t have to be super serious all the time.

KJ: Yeah, I think you’re right. And actually, I would go one step further for Channel 4 and say we should be creative with it, right? Because the whole reason for Channel 4 existing in the first place is to be disruptive, is to be the outlier, is to represent, to challenge, to reinvent in ways that perhaps some of the other broadcasters hadn’t been doing up until the point of our existence. So the onus is always on us in Channel 4, particularly with our marketing communications activity, to cut through and disrupt in a very creative and very distinctive way, which is why when you’re presented with a copy line like that copy line, it’s very easy to say yes to, because it feels very authentic to the tone of voice that Channel 4 is known for.

We have to always start with the audience, we have to start with the viewer and try and engage them around subjects that we know they are talking about and interested in and I think it was really plain to see from the way that conversations caught flight across particularly a lot of the social platforms after the Meta announcement that this was a subject that a lot of people were having strong reactions to. So we weren’t trying to insert ourselves into a conversation that therefore Channel 4 was trying to initiate. We were just joining a discussion that we could see was of real relevance to our viewers. What some advertisers, not just broadcasters, can be guilty of sometimes is what I like to call a bit of Dad-dancing at a disco in going, “Well, I think this topic is cool. So why don’t we just talk about it in a way that will reflect really well on our brand?” I’m not very interested in that. I’m more interested in finding out what’s going on for our audiences and then engaging in the conversation that’s already live.

So, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Considering What campaign that we launched for the Paralympics last year. That was a really difficult decision to move away from what we had been talking to the viewers about through the lens of Superhuman, which had existed from 2012, evolved into 2016 with Meet the Superhumans, broadening out to the disabled community and then sort of puncturing it in in 2020. It was a bold decision to move away from that because it had such high attribution back to Channel 4, but for us to sit around a table and say actually we need to challenge the viewers on their preconceptions about how disabled athletes to their mind are quote “overcoming their disabilities”. That was a great opportunity for us. And I think we measure the success of that campaign, again, not just in views of the Paralympics, but in seeing perceptions of the viewer in studies that we did afterwards, changing to the extent that 76% of people after engaging in that campaign, thought differently about disabled athletes. And that’s a huge success for us.

HL: And how much of that is driven by the fact that, as you said, you’ve been broadcasting the Paralympics since 2012?

KJ: I think it’s driven in part by that. In terms of Channel 4’s association with airing the Paralympics, there’s legacy in that. But every four years we have to think about a new way to remind viewers on why we’re doing that, right? And so the onus is on the marketing team to think about a compelling proposition, a compelling campaign to the viewer to remind them to come and watch it with us and I think we’ve done that really, really successfully.

The second example that I just want to use, one of my favourite things that we’re doing at the moment is “letting loose” – technical term – on our Threads account. I think it’s a superb example of us now starting to get comfortable with losing a bit of control and being confident in giving the tone of voice that exists and the conversation that exists around our brand [over] to audiences. So this idea of ‘Brandom’, where you are able to feel comfortable enough that if you say, “Hey, what does Channel 4 mean to you, viewers?”, you step away from that conversation and you let it percolate. I love seeing what’s going on on our Threads account. I mean, it’s completely mad and bonkers and you’d never be able to run a telly campaign or a poster campaign in a way that we can engage viewers on our Threads account.

HL: Can you explain that to me, as a non-Threads user?

KJ: A really good recent example is we posted something that said, “You know, if you don’t feel like watching the [US Presidential] Inauguration this evening at 9 p.m., Channel 4 will be showing 24 Hours in Police Custody, which we’re not saying is in any way connected whatsoever”. We would never run that as a poster because we would deem that to be an irresponsible position to take in an environment that has such mass reach, right? But it’s perfect for the tonality of that kind of platform to be able to just create a conversation between viewers and I like that – I think there’s an irreverence to it that we can lean into.

HL: I’d like to talk a bit about young audiences in particular. What’s your approach to engaging young audiences particularly around those really central values of public service media, that we want to make sure people understand?

KJ: It’s the perennial question isn’t it? We firstly need to be very clear on where those audiences are, and to understand attitudinally and behaviourally, what matters to them, so that we can engage them in the right way.

I think the digital content studio, 4Studio, that Channel 4 launched back in 2020, has a very clear directive to think about how we can create content that is for digital natives and the Gen Z audiences. So, you will be very familiar with the creation of our YouTube channel 4.0, for instance, where we commission a lot of digital-first content that sits on the YouTube platform to engage those younger viewers directly. From a marketing-specific perspective, we are clearly very interested in engaging creators and influencers more actively. That feels like something that we could do much more around. So there’s an interesting synergy between some of our 4.0 talent and how we use them through our marketing activity, which is something that we’re looking at.