• Our idea was to do something never done before – turn media into surveillance equipment and recreate the paranoia of being hunted
• This would bring the ‘invisible net’ of the surveillance power of the UK to life, putting people in the shoes of ‘the hunted’ and showing the difficulty of the task they were facing.
Creative Execution
We developed 325 different creative messages that ran across 114 formats on 37 media channels. We ensured that every creative was contextually aligned with each individual media format:
• ATM cash machine screens told you to ‘cut up your card’
• Personalised Starbucks cups that said ‘Don’t tell anyone your name’
• Public transport said to ‘hide your face’
• Travel card wallets told you ‘This is a tracking device’
• Receipts warned you ‘you’ve told them where you are, run’
• Gas stations proclaimed ‘abandon your car’
• Beer mats proclaimed ‘you have no mates’
• Mirrors that said ‘change your identity’
• Club stamps told people to ‘give a false name’
• Train panels instructed you to ‘leave town and never come back’
• Public telephones warned you to ‘never call your family’
• Public toilets told you to ‘leave no trace’
• 6.3 million people watched the series – that’s 10% of the UK population.
• We reached every Londoner an average of 33 times during the campaign
• There were over 19,000 Tweets about Hunted on the build-up to the first episode
• The first episode attracted 54% more people in the London region than the Channel 4 slot average for that period.
• Combined Video on Demand catch up viewing figures were the highest of any new show on Channel 4 in 2015.
• Hundreds of people captured photos of the Hunted media placements and shared them on social media with many proclaiming they felt ‘Hunted by Channel 4’.
• Hunted was a new show from Channel 4, the UK’s third largest broadcaster, that saw people try to evade capture from a group of surveillance experts
• To promote it, we turned 37 media channels into tracking devices to recreate the paranoia of being hunted
• We developed 325 individual creative messages that ran across 114 formats
• From ATM machines to Starbucks cups, we reached every Londoner an average of 33 times during the campaign, prompting 6.3 million people, 10% of the UK population, to watch the show
Insights, Strategy and the Idea
We had four principles that would generate the excitement and recreate the emotions of life on the run:
• Personal: reaching our audience in a space that feels personal, where the media was primarily speaking to an individual
• Day-to-day: finding places that were a part of people’s everyday lives, highlighting the things you do and places you go on a daily basis
• Surprising: impact through placement or message to add a heightened sense of surprise
• High frequency: reaching people as often as possible to increase the feeling of the ‘invisible net’ closing in.
The strategy put media at the heart of what we did, ensuring we reached our audience with contextually-relevant messages at all times.