Title	LAUNCHING FLEXIBLE BT TV: CINEMA ACTIVATION
Brand	BT
Product/Service	BT TV
Category	E01. Use of Film
Entrant	BT London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation	BT London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation 2	ESSENCE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation 3	DCM London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation 4	RECIPE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement	ESSENCE London, UNITED KINGDOM
Media Placement 2	DCM London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production	RECIPE London, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Rebecca Montgomery	Recipe	Head of Creative

Write a short summary of what happens in the film

Our faux sci-fi Broken Trace begins with a nighttime scene, with the opening image of a woman’s eye with the reflection of an escape reflected in it. The time is 2121 and society is a distant memory. A scream and thunder build tension in our post-apocalyptic world. Our spoof western blockbuster Bitter Truth opens with a tense scene of an angry cowboy walking into an empty saloon. 60 seconds in and time to break the fourth wall. Our actors turned to the camera to speak directly to cinemagoers and asked "You’re not here to watch this, are you? You wouldn’t pay for something you don’t want to watch at the cinema, so don’t put up with it at home”, before revealing BT’s new flexible TV packages. The result was the world’s first high impact, memorable

Cultural / Context information for the jury

People love TV, but hate paying for things they don’t want to watch. That’s why in March 2020, we launched flexible BT TV - the UK’s first range of flexible TV packages that can be switched on and off every month. To bring to life BT TV’s flexibility, in a world-first, we used contextual cinema advertising to play a prank on cinemagoers. We produced two 60 second fake film openings, deliberately designed to look and feel like the start of a real movie and ran them in the ‘gold spot’ to fool cinemagoers into thinking they were sat in the wrong screen. By combining the most premium media placement with a clever creative idea in the most captive environment, we found the perfect formula to land our message about the benefits of flexible TV.

Explain how the work innovatively used the film medium.

Cinema, the most immersive and sacred of ‘paid for’ media experiences. But all too often, TV ads are just rolled out to cinema. So to bring to life BT TV’s flexibility, in a world-first, we used contextual cinema advertising to play a prank on cinemagoers and make people take notice. We produced two 60 second fake film openings, deliberately designed to look and feel like the start of a real movie and ran them in the ‘gold spot’ to fool cinemagoers into thinking they were sat in the wrong screen. To elicit the best reactions, we carefully selected our hoax films to play in front of two distinct audiences. We even lined the cinema foyer walls with digital OOH posters for the spoof films to really embed the prank.