We hired a media student to write a paper: “In our parents’ day, TV shaped student culture. In our day, student culture is shaping TV. Discuss.” Of course, he couldn’t find his research in dusty libraries – so he posted questions on his blog and drove students there to answer them by seeding ‘conversation starters’ on campuses and stirring up a debate.

These conversations became our creative solution.

Why?

Because they described (more powerfully than we could’ve!) a generation which doesn’t just watch telly on their laptops… but texts about it, mashes it, spoofs it, downloads theme tunes, even bids on merchandise, every day in halls across the country. All we needed to do was play back to them their own words about how much they’re changing the way TV’s enjoyed ... in a multi-platform campaign that makes them realise it’s the TV Licence fee that makes it all possible.

We’d focused on the ‘value’ of the Licence rather than the fear of the ‘law’ and were rewarded:• Staggeringly 7 in 10 students were now aware they needed a TV Licence to watch live TV on their laptops• An unexpected 5.3% more students called in to let us know they didn’t need a TV Licence as they didn’t watch live TV in their rooms, enabling us to remove them from our ‘unlicensed database’• An unprecedented 7.5% increase in online sales of TV Licences meant less money could be spent collecting the TV Licence fee, more on TV.