Channel 4 News

Aim

Double the 16-34 year old audience of Channel 4 News online in order to fulfil their public service remit.

Insight

To build youth audiences for Channel 4 News we needed to place the target audience at the heart of their digital storytelling.

Approach

To understand how best to grow Channel 4 News audiences we had to answer the following questions:

What are the different types of audiences who consume news on social and how does their behaviour vary in terms of consuming and sharing news content ?

What is the vision and experience that would make Channel 4 News relevant, trusted and valued to these audiences?

What themes, stories and formats are of interest to these audiences? We then used these insights to create a toolkit that would help the Channel 4 News team, quickly and easily create audience-centric content going forwards.

This toolkit included new creative templates, a tone of voice document, a process for identifying and creating stories on social, ways to test and learn and measure success.

Results

This strategy proved highly successful, with Channel 4 News becoming one of the UK’s leading video news brands on Facebook. In 2016 videos across the Channel 4 News portfolio received almost 2 billion views, an increase of over 200% from 2015.

Commissioned research among 16–34s showed that Channel 4 News Facebook videos delivered strongly – 77% of respondents said they felt more informed as a result of watching them (compared to 64% for BBC News) and 61% said it made them see an issue in a different light (compared to 57% for BBC News).

Source: Channel 4 Annual Report 2016