Brief
Turn the launch of Skins into an entertainment event for an audience increasingly spending time away from the TV.

The Opportunity
You are a guest in the attention span of the 16-24 year old audience. Bore them and they will ruthlessly filter you out. Get it right and they will actively market to each other.

The Approach
Instead of trying to interrupt what our audience was interested in, we wanted to become what they were interested in.

Our ambition was to blur the distinction between the show and how it was marketed. Approaching everything as an opportunity to extend the show experience by investing in interesting ways for fans to meet and get to know the characters before a single episode had aired. We wanted to involve the audience, inviting their opinion and creativity and giving them the tools to spread their enthusiasm.

The Activity
Traditionally, a TV show is advertised just two weeks before its broadcast. With Skins, we identified an opportunity to build a community of fans to help drive positive word of mouth around the show, three months before TX.

Exclusives were given to key media partners and individual taste-makers, establishing the show's credibility as well as promoting positive word of mouth and a growing sense of community. By super-serving a small and growing community with exclusives, previews and extras, the fans gained ownership over the show, actively promoting it in their own right.

We created multiple bespoke content experiences distinct to the media destinations containing audiences we could best leverage as potential viewers.

The Results
In the week before launch the show had the highest levels of pre-launch awareness in Channel 4's history.

The three-minute version of the party trailer received 250,000 unique views. There were 500,000 unique users viewing myspace.com/e4skins in the month before transmission. During the week leading up to the first transmission, the site was receiving an average of 60,000 unique visitors per day, equivalent to the Big Brother site.

Over 20,000 total friends signed up prior to show with more than 5000 users featuring either the Skins' party trailer or banners and backgrounds on their own profiles to help promote the show. There are now over 1.4 million fans and friends on Skins social platforms.

The combined views of all the trails on Myspace were over 500,000.

On the day of the launch, Skins received 1.6 million viewers making it the largest ever audience for an E4 drama. To put this into context, this is a larger audience than Lost or 24 received at launch.

The End?
Since launch, we have worked on Skins for series 2, 3 and 4. Matching the success and vigour of the launch campaign was always going to be tough, but we have successfully managed to re-capture the enthusiasm time and again; it's become the digital marketing success story of the last 5 years. Our online strategy, marketing and creative around Skins has won nearly every award in the business. These include an IMA Grand Prix, 3 Gold IPAs, IMA effectiveness, NMA effectiveness, Guardian MEGAs, Promax design, Broadcast Digital and the Media Week awards.

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