Serial tips became a success story for Telenor

In a market characterized by intense competition between major players, it takes a lot to reach TV viewers. Especially if, like Telenor, you want to present the best of traditional linear TV and streaming.

- Competition in the Norwegian TV and streaming market is extremely competitive.

This is according to Martin Wenstad Janssen, Strategic Group Customer Manager at Aller Media. He outlines a new reality in the TV market - a paradigm shift where users are moving to pure streaming services such as Netflix, Sumo and HBO. At the same time, providers of traditional linear TV are working to position themselves as relevant to future TV viewers.

- Despite the fact that it may seem to many that most people only watch Netflix, this is far from the reality across the country," says Wenstad Janssen.

- The vast majority of people still watch linear TV, but usage and time spent is decreasing in favor of various streaming services.

For TV distributors today, it's all about remaining a hub of the entertainment offering that comes into people's living rooms. To do that, they need to pull off the trick of not letting the shift to streaming be the end of the road, but rather getting viewers to see the value of a bundled offering that consists of both streaming services and linear TV.

It was against this background that Telenor and OMD approached Aller Media to run a campaign for their T-We service.

Rebranding and branding

In the fall of 2018, the Canal Digital name was a thing of the past in the cable TV landscape. From then on, the name was Telenor T-We. The challenge was to replace a strong and well-known brand with a new one.

- The rebranding meant that a strong brand in the TV category became part of one of Norway's strongest brands - Telenor. The problem was that Telenor had no links to the TV or entertainment categories. Since the rebranding, that has been the mission of the T-We offering: to add entertainment to the Telenor brand," says Wenstad Janssen.

- That was no small task?

- No, this is a significant and demanding task. Telenor is a brand with a number of existing associations among the Norwegian population. To solve the task, Telenor and OMD have resorted to a two-pronged strategy, working on the one hand with traditional branding, while at the same time working with knowledge and building credibility around the fact that Telenor knows TV. This is where our campaign came in.

A four-way collaboration was established between Aller, Newslab, OMD and Telenor to develop the campaign in the best possible way.

- We have both experience and expertise about what kind of content the readers of Dagbladet are interested in, and we therefore had an advisory role to Newslab on how the stories should be angled so that they would have the best possible impact on our channels. It was a unique opportunity to collaborate on the content to be produced.

Series tips led to positive boosts

With the solution from Aller Media, the T-We campaign met Dagbladet readers throughout the entire customer journey.

- The main carrier of the campaign was new series tips that we ran every Friday on both content and print throughout the period, with contextual advertising and tactical content material segmented towards Telenor customers as supporting activities," says Martin Wenstad Janssen.

As all the content was to be published on Telenor's own website, Aller Media stepped in with expertise and advice on content design.

- We developed several new products, including a completely new format in the DB newspaper where T-We took ownership of the TV program on weekends. At the same time, we had a content space where we segmented towards existing Telenor customers. The entire outlet had a common thread from A to Z.

- And the results were not long in coming?

- The results are off the charts. We saw positive lifts in all the activities measured. TV viewing of the titles promoted every Friday increased by an average of 168%. Over 124,000 customers followed the series recommendations and found their new favorite series!

With an ambition to establish T-We as a trusted entertainment expert, Telenor also saw a big boost in the share of modern streaming TV customers.

- It is a very important metric for Telenor, which is about positioning them for the future. The campaign is referred to as a success story internally in Telenor.