A gripping murder mystery with an electrifying love story, Cleddau was set to be a real twisty binge watchable drama, that required a full media mix to promote it.

Challenge

S4C is the only broadcast TV channel in Wales that delivers purely Welsh speaking content. Many of S4C’s drama series have gone on to be hugely successful and acclaimed TV viewing, such as Hinterland, Keeping Faith and The Light in the Hall. Cleddau was set to be no exception, with a 6 part series that combined a gripping murder mystery with an electrifying love story. Set in the West Wales costal town of Pembroke Dock, Cleddau brings together a top-class team of Welsh crime drama talent. The series is written by Catherine Tregenna (The Bench, Law & Order UK, Lewis and DCI Banks) and stars Elen Rhys (The Mallorca Files, Craith/Hidden), Richard Harrington (Y Gwyll/Hinterland) and Rhian Blythe (Y Golau/The Light in the Hall, Craith/Hidden).

The core objective was to create a statement campaign promoting the series to 25-44 year olds, throughout Wales extending the appeal beyond the core Welsh speaking audience, to encourage them to watch Cleddau.

Therefore, our campaign objective included ‘build excitement’ and to ‘raise the awareness’
of the series.

Solution

Our campaign focused on building excitement by using channels with high attention and impact, we used media that reached Welsh speakers and upweighted in areas with higher percentage of a Welsh speaking population.

We aligned a consideration element of the campaign to big screen and contextual viewing, in many cases using a ‘sofa moment’ as a moment in time when the audience would be most susceptible to receiving and acting on an ad for a new crime drama.

Our media mix included OOH, Podcasts, Press, VOD, Social and YouTube.

Results

• Overall, all campaign channels saw an over delivery on the initial estimations with a high engagement rate across the digital channels. Using interest-based targeting as part of this campaign, ensured that relevant TV and drama enthusiasts were reached.

• Cleddau has become the third most popular drama series on S4C since 2016, appealing most to 45-64 ABC1. It also had wider appeal from diverse backgrounds and attracted a good proportion of fluent and non-Welsh speaking viewers.

  Linear Performance:

• Linear delivered an average of 41,700 viewers over the 6 episode series, which is higher than the Sunday night broadcast slot average (10,800 viewers), with the first four episodes performing very well linearly.

  Online Performance:

• As predicted this series was a real “binge” watch, with a high percentage of online and iPlayer viewing occurring before the TV broadcast. In fact, 47% of the average 86,900 viewers watched Cleddau online, with 93% on iPlayer.