Channel 4 Sales created its new brand partnerships studio to help brands be ‘culturally credible’ as audiences become ‘increasingly harder to reach’.
Emma Hopkins will lead Channel 4’s new Partner Lab, which launched last week and will focus on partnerships, sponsorships, creative strategy, and production.
Hopkins told MediaCat UK that Partner Lab demonstrates Channel 4’s ‘commitment to work more directly with brands’, as it helps them achieve cultural credibility among harder-to-reach audiences.
When asked whether Partner Lab might expect pushback from agencies about Channel 4’s plans to get closer to brands, Hopkins said that the studio will still keep agencies involved but that their ethos is ‘to be brand or advertiser first and agency aligned’.
‘I think that reflects more broadly of the industry as well — everything should be for the good of the brand and also for the audience that we’re serving,’ she added.
At present, Channel 4 Sales has about 1,400 advertisers. With Partner Lab, Hopkins said, they plan to roll out tailored strategies by advertiser segment and increase their advertiser base to over 10,000, but she declined to comment on revenue projections.
‘You’ll have your big enterprise clients, who we do aim to have a more strategic approach with, but by tiering our approach, it means that we can reach more people in different manners. We might work with more [SMEs] via scaled approaches versus client direct, but then for those big focused clients, it would be client direct,’ she explained.
Partner Lab has already released a couple of campaigns that, Hopkins said, were created out of previous content and creation solutions. One of the campaigns was a social branded content series for Movember and the other was a social short for Dominos, called The Real Pizza Queens of Milton Keynes.
Hopkins said that all campaign measurement and research is done in-house and that they look at different metrics based on each brand’s KPIs. She added that they do not promise certain viewer numbers and can only ‘give an indication based on previous campaigns’ when offering packages to potential clients.
Partner Lab’s campaigns aim to tackle the perception that TV is dying. Hopkins said this notion ‘absolutely is not factually correct’ and that Partner Lab wants to make people understand that what is actually happening is that viewers are now consuming content not only on linear but also via streaming, YouTube, and other platforms.
‘What we’ll do through our partnership campaign is just help our audience and our advertisers understand what TV looks like now and how it will look in the future as well,’ Hopkins said.