How to promote another dating show?

It’s no secret that, today, people watch TV differently than they used to. That means finding new ways to promote linear shows.

For MTV, whose core audience is the young millennials, this is extra challenging. It’s not necessarily part of their habits to “tune in” at a certain date and time to consume media. They live most of their lives in an on demand world.

But for us marketers the fact remains – we need as many eyeballs on the screen for our premieres as possible.

So how do you market something to a target audience that doesn’t really consume your product in the fashion you want? More to the point; how do you make as many young millennials as possible break their on-demand habit and get them to watch linear TV on a specific date and time?

How to promote yet another dating show?

In this particular case we were tasked with launching a new show called “Are you the One?”. It’s a reality dating show with a twist – 10 guys and 10 girls live in a house together and need to figure out who among them are meant to be together as determined by thorough profiling done ahead of them having ever met. If they succeed they all get to share a million dollars but if they make a single mistake no one gets anything. Drama is guaranteed.

There are many dating shows on TV so the campaign needed to not only promote a premiere date and an interesting cast, but also explain why this dating show is different from the others.

We decided to use a key part of the plot, the profiling, and make that into an interactive experience. That way we would educate the audience on the show synopsis to create interest and thereby tune-in. We also knew that if the profiling algorithm would be good enough we could have a viral campaign and the premiere date, which is attached to all communication, would spread through the target audience by user engagement alone.

The strategy was clear: Mass communication of the premiere date through virality while at the same time educate users about the show’s synopsis.

Match Machine - Big Data, fantastic algorithm, and virality

We partnered with an agency experienced in creating similar campaigns and the result was a Facebook application called “Match Machine”.

Match Machine worked by letting it connect to the user’s Facebook data and from that it would tell you who of your friends you should be dating. The results were everything from surprising, outrageous and embarrassing to spot on, and this was the key to success – no matter what result you got, it was obviously based on real data. Or as Huffington Post later would put it: “Weirdly accurate”.

So now we had a fantastic algorithm delivering exciting results. But that alone wasn’t enough to make it fly. We also had to make sure the app was easy to use, so we decided to not focus on promotional messaging right away. Instead we focused on the core functionality to really get people invested.

But what about the promotion? This is after all the point of this whole thing. When the app connects to Facebook and calculates the result it needs about 20-30 seconds of processing time. This is where we chose to put the promotional message in the form of a full trailer video about the length of the processing time needed. This was done so the user had something to do while waiting for the result.

The last component was to facilitate virality. Since the algorithm was solid, we knew most results would induce some sort of reaction from the user, be it laughter, embarrassment, or surprise. Reactions such as these are the heart of successful viral campaigns. People want their friends to also experience what they’re experiencing. A big “SHARE YOUR RESULT” button was placed under the custom result text. Clicking it would render a customized share graphic featuring the Facebook portraits of both the user and their match.

When we launched the campaign site and promoted it across our markets in Northern Europe we saw an early sign of success: the hosting crashed. After pausing promotion for a bit, and having upgraded the hosting, we continued the campaign but it hardly needed any more pushes. We got millions of visits in the first three weeks and 85% of the traffic was coming from the app itself – proving it was a viral success. We even maxed out our free Google Analytics account and had to get a second tracking code in place.

We could have stopped there but seeing as MTV is a global brand we knew we had an opportunity to fan the flames even more. Using Google Analytics and Facebook App Insights we saw where the app travelled outside the original campaign region and started local language versions in those markets with the help of our company network. This increased the traffic even more.

124 million match tests, 58 years of brand exposure, 1+ Billion Facebook impressions

After the campaign was over it was still seeing tens of thousands of daily users, so we decided to let it live on as a service. After all, “no strings attached” brand exposure is a good thing.

Six months later the show was picked up for a new season and since Match Machine still had lots of traffic the decision to make a new version was obvious. To get old users back we added new functionality for them to explore and at the same time to a little graphical update to make it feel new. We also added functionality that would tell users why they got the match that they did. The strategy worked and we saw usage increase already on the soft launch before the second campaign had started. Using Google Analytics custom events we could see the new features getting a lot of usage from return users – people were coming back.

After the second campaign we saw the same pattern as after the first. The traffic just kept coming, so again we let it live on. On May 12th 2015 Facebook updated their APIs and Match Machine had to be closed as a result.

When wrapping up, we see a PR reach in the tens of millions as the campaign was featured in many influential publications such as Mashable, Huffington Post, Esquire and Bustle to name a few. It was also named “Best Facebook Campaign of the Year” by Mashable and awarded a “European Excellence Award”.

The online numbers shows just under 50 million visits to the campaign site. The visitors made a total of 124 million match tests. Each match test took an average of 15 seconds to calculate. Add it all up and you get 58 years of exposure of our brand and tune-in message. Add on top of that over 1 billion Facebook impressions from users sharing their results.

Match Machine is probably one of the most widespread digital/social campaigns to date, but it wouldn’t have been as successful without a responsive and flexible brand organization who understands to adapt and tweak the campaign as it goes on.

Philip Johannessen

Philip is senior manager at Viacom in Amsterdam and works with online content and marketing for MTV, Comedy Central and Paramount. He also leads the editorial web team for Benelux and Nordic markets. Prior to starting at Viacom in 2013 he worked as project manager and creative producer at various digital agencies in his hometown of Stockholm.