Anglian Home Improvements – ITV1 Sponsorship Break Bumpers

January 2010 on ITV1 opened with a totally new and daring venture in the world of the celebrity talent show - ‘Popstar to Operastar’.

Our client Anglian Home Improvements decided, at the very last moment, to take the plunge and sponsor the series.

The shortage of time played a crucial part in the production process of the ad-break bumpers, because whatever we did had to be simple to execute, have many potential versions, and require minimal post-production (as post-production would all be happening over the Christmas period).

There were a number of challenges. Firstly, the programmes would vary in length – starting and ending with a one hour special, and forty-minute shows in between – meaning for variety we would require at least 20 different bumpers, besides opening and closing titles.

Secondly, the series concept was not only to whittle-down the number of celebrities via popular votes each week, but also to witness the singers improving as the weeks went by. There was no way of knowing whether the series would end in farce with some ex-club singer yodeling Nessun Dorma, or whether we would witness the birth of the next Pavarotti. So the ‘tone’ of the creative would have to be flexible enough to alter over time to match the show.

Thirdly we had NO idea what the show, its studio or its titles would look like – and, despite press speculation, ITV wouldn’t reveal in advance the line-up of judges or contestants.

Finally, and the bane of any Sponsor’s life, was to find a strong link between the Sponsor and the show, without portraying a product or making a call to action. Anglian Home Improvements and Opera? Duh….

After much head-scratching, the creative team at agency ‘The Point’ cooked-up a perfect parallel between the gradual honing of operatic skills and improving the home – summed up in the line ‘Room for Improvement’. It was then but a short step to concluding we should capture real people ‘having a go’ at Opera.

UGC? Shot on the street? Perhaps done on-line? All totally unpredictable, and how would feeble performances (if that’s all we captured) sit alongside the concluding episode of the show in which a new Maria Callas might be unveiled?

We guessed (correctly!) that as a studio-based show they’d probably go for a glitzy look, and to ensure an adequate range of singers we tipped-off Operatic and Choral Societies as well as the general public about our ‘auditions’. Two days of amazing performances gave us all the material we could wish for – and we will never forget the stunned silence that greeted the discovery of ‘our’ Pavarotti.

RESULTS

Over the 6 week series, audiences swept upwards towards 6 million. In that time, Anglian’s unprompted name awareness rose by an unprecedented 37%. On-line, its linked website created significant activity, with enthusiastic members of the public actually uploading videos of their own operatic performances.