BSkyB Launches £20 Million Campaign To Promote Sky Plus

BSkyB will this week embark on its biggest promotion since the launch of Sky Digital five years ago, with a £20 million advertising campaign to push its Sky Plus personal video recording service.

The integrated through-the-line campaign is part of a major strategic move to use Sky Plus to drive the satellite broadcaster’s subscriptions towards the target of eight million by the end of 2005.

It also represents the first time that BSkyB has ventured outside its existing customer base to promoted the benefits of Sky Plus, which enables subscribers to create their own viewing schedules and skip through the commercial breaks.

Above-the-line elements of the campaign include a range of spots on Sky and terrestrial television channels, posters and sponsorship of Virgin Radio’s breakfast show. The Sky Plus service will also be promoted through direct mail, in the Sky Customer magazine and on a new dedicated website, www.skyplus.co.uk.

The television activity launches later this week with three 40-second spots in which a variety of unlikely celebrity couples are used to demonstrate how Sky Plus personal video recorder transforms television viewing.

The couples – Bruce Forsyth and Kelly Brook, Ronnie Corbett and Alice Cooper, Noddy Holder and Simon Callow – are shown living together and debating what to watch on television. Each of the executions ends with the strapline: “Sky Plus, Create your own TV channel” to convey the main benefits of the service.

Commenting on the initiative, Jon Florsheim, BSkyB’s managing director of sales, marketing and interactive, said: “Sky Plus is a fantastic product that transforms television viewing. With our biggest campaign since the launch of Sky digital, we aim to communicate its benefits to the mass market for the first time and ensure that BSkyB remains the brand leader in digital television.”

The Sky Plus brand has been redesigned to coincide with the launch of the campaign and the cost of the equipment has been reduced from £249 to £199. The £10 monthly subscription charged has also been waived for consumers who adopt the top Sky package.

It is understood that the service currently has around 150,000 subscribers and the new campaign is expected to boost numbers to 300,000 by the end of June next year.

BSkyB’s outgoing chief executive, Tony Ball, announced earlier this year that PVRs would figure prominently in BSkyB’s strategies for future development, as falling hard-disk costs allow the group to market the digital recorders at a price that is more attractive to consumer (see BSkyB Restructures Pricing Scheme To Boost Sky Plus).

Executives at this year’s International Television Festival in Edinburgh claimed that PVRs are having far less impact on viewing habits than was once predicted and currently pose no significant threat to television advertising (see MGEITF 2003: PVRs Fail To Revolutionise TV Viewing).

BSkyB: 020 7705 3000 www.sky.com

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