Road-Testing Angles: How Broadcast Relationships Shape Campaigns Before They’re Built
A big part of building a broadcast strategy for us is collaborating on stories in the early planning stages and working out whether the idea actually has legs before we commit to it. We’re speaking to producers all the time, so we use those relationships much earlier than the sell-in.
If we’re looking at a campaign and there are a couple of possible angles, we’ll pick up the phone and test them. Which one would you be more likely to cover? What would you need for this to become a story? Is the research strong enough?
Would you prefer an expert, someone with lived experience, or a bigger name? Does the timeline work for your programme? Would you need a case study alongside them? Has this been done too many times already? Is there a particular way you’d want us to frame it? What would make you take this into an editorial meeting?
Those conversations can be really useful. A producer might like the subject but tell us the angle isn’t quite there. They might say they’d cover it if we could prove X, or if the research looked at Y instead. They might love the story but have no interest in the spokesperson we were considering. Or they might tell us they’ve had five versions of the same story in their inbox that week.
That’s the kind of thing you want to know before research has been commissioned, spokespeople have been booked and everyone is wedded to an angle. We take that feedback back to the client and work through it together. Sometimes it’s a small tweak, and sometimes we end up taking the story somewhere quite different. And sometimes the answer is that it probably isn’t going to work for broadcast, which is just as important to know.
The process can sound simple, but you can only really do it if you have genuine relationships with the people you’re asking. These aren’t cold calls to a newsroom asking someone to rate an idea. They’re producers we speak to regularly, who know us, and who are happy to tell us what they think because there’s trust on both sides.
I believe this is one of the most useful bits of intel we can bring into the planning process. Rather than building a campaign based on what we think broadcasters might want and finding out when we start selling it in, we can get them into the conversation much earlier and build the story with that knowledge from the start.
This isn’t just road-testing an angle once a story has already taken shape. It’s about co-creating and collaborating with organisations from the early planning stages, so the story being built has the most impact possible across the many waves of broadcast.
Words by Maria Ferrer.
