Title	THE MOST RIDICULOUSLY HONEST MEDIA CAMPAIGN EVER
Brand	UKTV
Product/Service	DAVE GORMAN - MODERN LIFE IS GOODISH
Category	C06. Publications & Media
Advertising Agency	WIEDEN+KENNEDY London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Agency	PHD ROCKET London, UNITED KINGDOM
Entrant Company	PHD ROCKET London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Rebecca Hughes	PHD Rocket	Account Director
Claire Milton	PHD Rocket	Campaign Manager
Kim-Leng Hoeu	PHD Rocket	Senior Search Strategist
James McHoull	Wieden/Kennedy	Account Director
Jonathan Plackett	Wieden/Kennedy	Creative Director

Brief Explanation

This campaign centres on the launch of Season 2 of British comedian Dave Gorman’s TV show Modern Life is Goodish, a show in which he spends an hour each week pointing out the ridiculousness of British life – including the weird things brands do in their marketing. For the show’s broadcaster UKTV, a returning commission had never increased its ratings in its second season. Our job was to end that record. To do that, we drew new audiences into the show’s content before it had even aired by making Dave’s material the media strategy.

Results and Effectiveness

Rather than being upset at the intrusion into their lives, recipients responded with delight and forgiveness, congratulating Dave for his targeting and sharing our work. 4.1m people saw one or more of our 20 personalised ads, with more than 1-in-20 of the people targeted in our Twitter feeds choosing to engage with our strange content. But more importantly, the ratings for Season 2 were 11% higher than Season 1. Making Modern Life is Goodish the channel’s FIRST EVER SHOW to grow its ratings in a 2nd season. Proof that honesty IS the best policy.

Creative Execution

We hand-crafted a series of ridiculous personalised ads which were then optimised to hit 6 million social media feeds. Amongst these were ads served to people who had tweeted about milkshakes where we told them we were advertising a TV show to them for no other reason that they’d tweeted about milkshakes. Another execution (not so) randomly served an ad featuring a picture of a lasagne and a man in a kilt to Scotsmen who we knew liked cooking. Each ad then asked the recipient to think about why they get all those other ads in their social media feeds!

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

What unlocked our idea was the fact that most people outside the media industry have little appreciation of how their social media behaviour is being harnessed for marketing purposes. So we turned a much-resented advertising behaviour (intrusive personalisation) into a positive launch mechanic for Dave’s show. We created THE UK’S MOST RIDICULOUSLY HONEST MEDIA CAMPAIGN EVER - a comic campaign that railed against the worst of advertising behaviour by using the very ad-targeting mechanics Dave ridicules himself. This meant revealing the secrets of how digital media targeting works to create entertaining pieces of content for the show in the process.