Situation:

Reality TV is one of the most popular TV genres and topics in culture. In fact, it’s watched twice as much as sports. We also discovered that reality TV is one of the reasons why Xfinity subscribers don’t ditch their cable for streaming services like Netflix. Only Xfinity brings fans all the best reality TV in one place. Despite its popularity, it’s still considered a guilty pleasure and hasn’t been widely celebrated by a brand until now.

Brief:

The goal was to build brand love for Xfinity subscribers and show them we’re committed to bringing them more of their entertainment passions.

Objectives:

We set out to change the “guilty pleasure” perception of reality TV and legitimize fans’ passion for it. In doing so, we hoped to increase brand love and make reality TV fans feel important. We also hoped to retain and gain subscribers.

In America, sports bars are everywhere because people love watching sports together. Xfinity discovered something interesting — people also love watching reality TV together. It’s actually a more popular TV genre than sports. Yet there isn’t a public space where reality fans can come together like sports fans. This discovery was the inspiration behind the Xfinity Reality Bar — a real Miami sports bar that we transformed into the first bar designed for reality TV fans. We partnered with 28+ reality TV stars and influencers to capture 378 pieces of content, turning the bar into its own reality TV set. These videos were shared on YouTube and Xfinity’s cross-channel hub for 30 million cable customers. We filmed a Live After Show through Twitter for four consecutive nights, accumulating 16 million views. Overall, content filmed at the bar had a total of 31 million video views and 90.2 impressions.

Once we narrowed in on our reality TV audience, our strategic focus was to create something that would truly resonate with reality TV fans. To cut through the enormous amount of reality TV daily gossip, our idea had to be original and inherently rooted in reality TV culture. Obviously, it was imperative that our idea involve reality stars. We didn’t want to use talent as an afterthought, we wanted to leverage them in a meaningful way that felt as raw as reality TV. We also wanted to create an experience that fans everywhere could enjoy by coming up with an idea that would ultimately generate even more reality TV content. We reached out to reality TV networks, relevant content creators and lifestyle brands for collaboration and to help amplify our idea.

Implementation:

Once the idea of a bar where reality TV fans could gather was formed, we began to work with networks and brands to create the run of show for the event.

Timeline:

We had 24 hours to transform the sports bar into the Reality Bar. The doors opened on January 6th at 6pm and closed at midnight on January 9th.

Placement:

Content was shared through social channels, reality-TV influencers and partners. We created 15 videos that were uploaded to the X1 platform via YouTube, 70 organic social posts on Instagram, four Twitter Live shows and 18 paid social posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. We also inspired reality-TV influencers to share their experiences on social, which resulted in 271 posts.

Scale:

The Reality Bar experience received 90.2 million impressions.

Reach:

We worked with 7 networks, one content creator company, and one lifestyle brand to bring 25+ reality stars and talent to the activation. They shared the activation on their own social channels. Our activation produced 378 assets that received over 90 million views.

Engagement:

We streamed 4 consecutive Twitter Lives from the Reality Bar with total live and replay viewership increasing on average by 11% each night.

Fans spent over 8200 hours with videos flighted from the Xfinity handle on Facebook and Instagram.

Impact:

Those who attended were 14% more likely to consider purchasing Xfinity than average.

Reality Bar drove over 2,000+ hours of organic viewership of original content on the Xfinity X1/Youtube Platform.

List of Results:

90.2M Total impressions

31 Million Video Views

64K Peak Concurrent Live Views

16.5 Million Live and Replay Views

17K “Show Me Reality Week” Voice Commands

25K X1 Hub/Youtube Views