News / Press Releases

Mobile response TV campaign sends single mums free books

Source: www.160characters.org (29 May 2008)
http://www.160characters.org

A book-gifting programme for Booktrust that delivers free packs of books to families of children under 4 years old has generated a direct response by mobile from 8% of the target audience in a TV response campaign.

Bookstart is an independent charity that encourages people to read. It is a public and private partnership and benefits from sponsorship from over 20 children's publishers, Red House Books and central funding from Sure Start. It is distributing 80,000 free books to parents of young children via the Bookstart programme, following their recent debut interactive TV campaign.

Hard To Reach Social Groups

The campaign, created by Kitcatt Nohr Alexander Shaw in partnership with mobile agency Incentivated, was planned by Trinity Communications and bought by Manning Gottlieb OMD. Its objective was to encourage hard to reach social groups of teenage mums, single parents, parents with basic literacy skills and non-native English speakers to read more to young children and communicate the benefits of reading to children under four years of age.

Mobile Call To Action

The heavy weight TV campaign delivered 1,236 TV spots of 30 and 20 seconds throughout the day across 34 terrestrial and digital channels for one month. The Bookstart TV ads featured a mobile call-to-action for viewers to request a free book by texting BOOK, their house number and post code to 80800. The TV ads can be viewed here.

Bookstart's target audience of parents and carers were encouraged to respond to the adverts by texting free from their mobile phones. Mobile was the only response channel used. Analysis conducted by Incentivated of the text requests identified which TV spots generated the highest responses. The text call to action appears prominently at the end frame of each ad for 3 seconds. The service was totally free to use ( text messages were free on zero-rated shortcode, books were also delivered free of charge).

In total the campaign resulted in 79,415 text requests for books. This represents 8% of the estimated 1 million UK households with children aged 3-4 years old. On average each TV spot resulted in 64 texts.

Develop a Lifelong Love of Reading

Emily Butt, Bookstart Campaigns and Communications Manager, Booktrust speaking of the campaign said:

"Our experience shows that reading to children as babies and infants helps them develop a lifelong love of reading and has emotional and academic benefits for the child's development. This TV campaign has reached groups in society who don't always think of book sharing. We're delighted that mums and carers have texted us in such numbers for a copy of our guide to book sharing and information on how to obtain free books for their children."

Simon Timlett, Partner at media planning agency Trinity Communications commented:

"These stunning campaign results support our strategy to recommend TV as the sole media and text as the sole response mechanism for this hard to reach audience. By analysing the media habits of the target audience we were able to choose to run this campaign primarily on daytime TV due to its reasonably low cost and to engage hard to reach social groups who often make appointments to view programmes broadcast during the day."

Robert Thurner, Commercial Director of Incentivated adds:

"This campaign proves what we have known for some time. Mobile provides an immediate response to advertising, whether using above or below the line channels, and offers brands the accountability on a scale TV advertising has lacked for years. Text messages are time and date stamped, allowing us to correlate responses with the TV spots broadcast, which allow us to draw meaningful conclusions with far-reaching implications for advertisers".