TG4 asked us to create a campaign that would increase visits to their VOD player, promoting homegrown content to an international audience. Part of our idea consisted of creating a new show for the player, hosted by an animated character (Caitlín Eile) based on a real TG4 weather girl (Caitlín Nic Aoidh), which would drive viewers to the best content the player had to offer.
We created Caitlín Eile using the beta version of Adobe Character Animator, making her the world’s first weather presenter and TV show host created using this technology. To launch her new show, we ran a series of live stunts on TV and seeded them on social. As TG4 owned the TV channel, we had the opportunity to be much more innovative than normal. In our first stunt (Monday) we ‘killed off’ Caitlín Nic Aoidh, the real weather girl – on whom our character was modelled – live on air. On Tuesday, we ran a missing persons report on the news using the real presenters for added authenticity. On Wednesday, our animated character stepped up to present the weather in place of the real Caitlín who was still missing. And on Thursday Caitlín Nic Aoidh returned to confront her digital doppelganger. On social media we also employed the use of Snapalytics and Snapchat’s camera roll functionality that were both in beta versions. These allowed us to film content in advance and release those clips at desired times to make it look as though everything our audience saw was happening in real time.
On Snapchat we grew TG4’s audience by 196% and had over 296,000 Snapchat views during the week the campaign ran.
On Twitter, we had a reach of over 20 million unique views. With a creative of budget of less than €20k and a paid media budget of only €500, we created a campaign with an earned media value of €2.9 million. This culminated in a return on investment for TG4 of 13,181%. Helping us introduce a huge global audience to a little known station in the west of Ireland.
