Powering The UK’s Vital Connections audio version  |  11 mins  |  Listen now

Yet no merger is ever truly a done deal until it is cleared by the Competition and Markets Authority prompted Virgin Media’s parent Liberty Global to embark on an integrated six-month campaign designed to raise awareness of the beneficial power of the combined entity to the wider economy and its own credentials.

For Bill Myers, the Denver-based managing director of communications and corporate responsibility, the campaign marked the latest stage in a four-year journey to reduce Liberty Global’s ‘over-indexing’ on earned media and build ‘an omnichannel strategy that would create a larger, more engaged, owned community’.

He adds: ‘We wanted to build those audiences so that we could communicate our stories, content and our messages in a more direct fashion. Not that we discount the media. We have strong partnerships with reporters, and we know that they speak with a megaphone more broadly, but for those people who know us, who wanted to be part of our broader ecosystem, we wanted to really grow and enhance those channels.’

As the Liberty Global team in London, led by communications director Rebecca Pike developed their skills in growing these communities, they also learned about the ‘science of driving engagement and interaction’.

Myers adds: ‘We now bring real rigour and sophistication to how we are tracking and measuring. It’s not about measuring for measurement’s sake. You measure to derive insights. We brought real science to this.’

Such insights shaped the campaign, which Liberty Global entitled Powering the UK’s Vital Connections, as it was structured around three pillars: powering the UK economy (gigabit broadband), powering communities (levelling up) and powering the future (the road to net zero).

Prior to the launch, the company worked with American-based PSB Insights to benchmark its standing in terms of favourability, trust and leadership.

‘They put together a funnel for us, and showed what percentage we were in terms of favourability, how people trusted us, leadership et cetera. This was a targeted influencer campaign with pretty clear goals,’ explains Pike. ‘We were aiming to influence a key audience, this Westminster bubble of around 8,000 people. Our primary goal was to increase those [benchmarked] metrics. But we also had other key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click through rates. On social media, we wanted each advert that we put out to be seen by our audience an average of seven times – which is more than double the average.’

Seven or eight times is, according to one of Liberty Global’s advisers, Tom Edmonds, founding partner at marketing agency Edmonds Elder, the magic number. ‘He does this stuff a lot with his audiences, and he said that seven or eight is what we want. The idea was to burn our messages in the retina of our audience really so they couldn’t forget what we were saying,’ adds Pike. The agency also developed the messaging and copywriting for individual ads.

‘Our one key message was the amount we invested in the UK every year, which enabled us to invest in gigabit broadband and for the government to meet two-thirds of its gigabit target four years early. We put that one message into every single asset that we put out,’ she explains.

Myers adds: ‘We wanted the Westminster bubble to understand, number one: the investments that we are making; number two: the commitment we have to the UK; and, number three: that [Liberty Global] is not an investment house. It is a powerful value-add to the family of brands that sit beneath us. When most big brands do [a campaign like this], they always have a business motivation behind them. It’s a pending regulatory issue, or legislation or a bad reputation. That was not our problem. We just wanted to build brand perception and equity so that we are better understood.’

The campaign was given an unexpected human dimension, shortly after launch, when it became clear that many children were unable to access laptops during lockdown either because they did not have broadband at home or because of poor coverage and were, as a result, missing out on their education.

‘We brought that key message about gigabit broadband alive by talking about those families unable to access the internet during lockdown. We were able to ladder off the key message using a series of films [produced by Taylor Made Media] and bring it down to individual case studies, showing how we were making a big difference to individuals and businesses, especially in the red wall areas,’ adds Pike. ‘A lot of our case studies were in the north of England, aimed at those MPs by talking about the stuff they really care about.’

But she concedes that, while case studies can be the ‘bread and butter’ for media pick up, identifying appropriate candidates can be hard because ‘processes are not in place to find them in the business’. For every ten stories put forward, perhaps nine do not work as they sound too much like sales puff or fail to emotionally connect with the target audience. ‘We had to focus on people whose lives we were really making a difference to, such as businesses that would have failed because of COVID if they didn’t have broadband,’ she adds.

For example, one case study focused on a wine bar in Manchester that survived lockdown by offering wine tastings online, while another highlighted an NGO helping young people in Kilburn start businesses on their mobile phones. ‘They were genuine stories that made me feel emotional and proud that we had helped get these people through incredibly difficult times,’ says Pike.

Both Myers and Pike stress the value of the agencies used in this campaign - the squad, as they dubbed them - but point out that a ‘vast amount of heavy lifting was done internally’.

Myers adds: ‘Ultimately, this is about building brand equity, so you’ve got to own it. You need very strong partner relationships where you can say That’s not right and that’s not quite right but let’s explore these three areas. A lot of brands make the mistake of bringing in the best and the brightest agencies and saying Just go with it and give us the results at the end.’

Similarly, Myers believes that it is important that there is an independent assessment of the agency's results. It meant that ‘we had great confidence in the analytics that we were getting back’. Having an established brand funnel also helped illustrate the success of the campaign to internal stakeholders, including the board.

'You move down the funnel from awareness to leadership, to advocacy and then you see where you were at the beginning of the campaign and how that changed over time,’ he explains. ‘We were careful to measure at the beginning of the campaign, so we could demonstrate how that changed over time. It is meaningful.

‘If you could say We improved advocacy by X per cent, which means that, of that audience of 5,000 highly influential people, there are now a higher number of people who will stand up [for your brand], that’s meaningful. We care about impressions and engagement and all that stuff, but the brand funnel is really where the money meets the road for senior leaders.’

All told, Liberty Global and its agency network created nearly 150 assets, which included more than 100 banners for display advertising and three print adverts.

The company sponsored the newsletters of Politico, Spectator and New Statesman: the click-through rates were three times higher than the benchmark. Display advertising featured in Politico, Spectator, Guido Fawkes, Conservative Home and the New Statesman. ‘The Conservatives are in power and have the vast majority of seats in Parliament, so we were focusing on them,’ adds Pike, explaining how Liberty Global chose the publications.

Traffic was driven to a bespoke landing page on Liberty Global’s website, designed by The Web Kitchen, achieving 3,700 hits, with users spending around 4.4 times longer than normal on the Vital Connections section. They also viewed other content on the site, and were more proactive than typical users, viewing 2.3 times more pages. And the magical seven number was achieved, with more than two million impressions across display ads and social media exposing its audience to an exceptionally high frequency of messages.

But the real meat came from the key metrics that were being targeted. These revealed that those who had seen the campaign were markedly more positive about Virgin Media and Liberty Global than those who had not. Favourability came in at 55 per cent for those who hadn't seen the campaign against 89 per cent for those who had; trust 36 per cent not seen, 64 per cent seen; leadership 62 per cent not seen, 82 per cent seen; and ‘speaks positively about’ from 27 per cent not seen, 55 per cent seen.

A bespoke analytics dashboard created by Finsbury Glover Hering allowed the Liberty Global team to see how each aspect of the campaign was performing in real time. ‘What is so great about so many of these channels that we are operating in, is that you have a very clear line of sight on the results. It’s so far beyond the practice of our craft 15 years ago,’ adds Myers.

‘We used to work with blunt instruments, now we work with lasers and scalpels. It is fascinating to be able to work in an environment where you’re seeing results in real-time, which allow you to pivot… to not move on the next theme, say, because we were getting so much traction on this one, or to go back because we weren’t getting traction. It’s so cool when you can make real time tweaks and corrections to affect outcomes.’

Both agree that they have now created the template for a campaign that could be applied to other markets or challenges. ‘We are very focused on learning from our campaigns so that the next time we do it, we improve our results by X per cent. We sit at the top, and have operating companies like Virgin Media, O2, we can use [our experience] to help them enhance and improve what they do,’ explains Myers. ‘It has remapped our vascular system to some extent in terms of how we partner with the businesses that are part of our ecosystem.’

But is there anything they wished they had done differently? Pike has considered whether Liberty Global should have gone directly to a small sub-section of its audience with a survey for additional insights, but recognises that the benchmarking by PSB meant such a move was unnecessary.

As for Myers, he explains that, as a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council at Liberty Global, he has been learning about new tools, including one called Equity Sequence, which is increasingly replacing unconscious bias training. It enables organisations to build equity, and ultimately equality, one question and decision at a time.

‘It’s where you take strategies and projects and begin from the standpoint of making sure you start with equity in mind,’ he explains. ‘It’s equity across the board. It’s race and ethnicity. It’s gender. It’s economic and socio-economic. In retrospect, I wish we had more awareness of the Equity Sequence before. It wouldn’t have radically changed anything we did, but I’d be curious to see how, if you did an A and B, and A is what we did but B started with the Equity Sequence, the two results compared. If we were to do this again, we would start with that.’