ITV

Mass Culture Creativity

Finding, and working with, the trends that matter to mainstream audiences

On The Pulse Of Popular Culture

Different brands need to tune in to trends for different reasons. For ITV, it’s about reflecting the shifting attitudes, behaviours and tastes of British culture – also about finding positive ways to shape culture for good. That mindset is already writ large for all to see in the broadcaster’s communications and output, but it’s also something that continually needs working at.

Which is where we came in: designing a trends programme to flow into their Livewires platform, helping ITV in creating programming and advertising content that is on the pulse of popular culture.

Project Design

+ Co-shaping with ITV a framework of broad topic areas to explore in the work; one that allowed us to distinguish between early adopter and mainstream manifestations

+ Combined trends analysis and culture-at-scale exploration of social media data to identify the drivers within each topic; and how they are starting to be - or could be - reflected in media and entertainment formats, brand partnerships and advertising solutions

+ Bi-annual editorialised reports and workshop sessions, collaborating with stakeholders to apply the right trends to the right programming opportunities

Ten Macro Trends, 60 Micro Trends

Trends topic areas included ‘Simple Pleasures’, ‘Breaking Taboos’, ‘Back To Nature’ and ‘Money Talks’ – rich and vibrant themes that gave us ample scope to drill down into the specifics of language used, sentiment expressed and their executional relevance to mass culture audiences. We also plotted their path from early adoption to wider acceptance, plus addressable tensions within each area – at each stage providing the detail and evidence to ensure stakeholder trust.

We successfully pinpointed and defined ten macro trends in total, and then over 60 micro trends, with Livewires offering a vital, always-on source of inspiration for ITV teams.

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.