Channel 4 launches ‘Tribes Live’ online community

Channel 4 has launched an online community called ‘Tribes Live’ for 16-24 year old viewers, hopping on the content marketing wagon.
The scheme is part of Channel 4’s UK Tribes project, which was established in collaboration with research and strategy agency Crowd DNA several years ago. The broadcaster sent invitations to join ‘Tribes Live’ to members of its online database who met the age criteria with a view to developing engaged community using a tailored content strategy.
To register with ‘Tribes Live’ viewers must complete a questionnaire, and their answers are used to sort them into youth sub-cultures, such as ‘Emo’ or ‘Hipster’. The members can then interact with one another on the online community.
Sue Grey, Head of advertising research and development at Channel 4, said: “Our Tribes Live initiative builds on the unique relationship Channel 4 has with young adults. Over a third of all 16-24 year olds in the UK have now registered with Channel 4 and our Tribes Live community enables us to engage a sample of these viewers and explore a broad range of issues with them in real time.”
“We’re looking forward to working with agencies and advertisers by extending the use of this immediately available community to our commercial partners to give them significant insight into the entire spectrum of young adults – an often elusive demographic for traditional research.”
Channel 4 will use ‘Tribes Live’ to improve awareness of the trends followed by its most engaged audience demographic. The broadcaster will pose questions to the ‘tribes’, and will initiate discussions on topics such as media, lifestyle and brands.
This strategy creates both an engaged community with relevant, topical content for the target age group (good for the consumer), and allows Channel 4 to collect valuable consumer insight with which to tailor future programming and marketing/advertising activity (good for the brand). Double win with this content marketing strategy.