BritBox’s chief marketing officer Diana Pessin is on a mission to inspire US audiences to enjoy highly crafted quality shows and films from the UK.
“As a specialty streamer, we like to call ourselves a complement to the other streamers,” says Pessin. “We are bringing a different viewpoint than what you’re seeing everywhere else. We’re bringing different stories in a very fresh way to new audiences.”
BritBox is a speciality streaming service founded in 2017 that brings “the best of British content” to viewers around the globe. The brand has seen double digit growth over the last year in the US and Pessin’s challenge is to maintain that trajectory. The hurdle is to build brand awareness among consumers unaware of the streamer in a competitive market. The opportunity is to promote high quality shows to viewers that are always hungry for new content.
“We are really leaning into the emotion of what storytelling brings,” explains Pessin. “There’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of need for escape these days. We are leaning into that escapism and immersiveness that consumers can really gravitate towards. It’s something that our brand is uniquely positioned to be able to deliver against.”
The brand recently launched the “See It Differently” to help highlight their unique differentiator. “It’s really dimensionalizing some of the real qualities of British storytelling, which is craft in front of and behind the camera,” says Pessin. “There is a big audience out there for quality.”
Pessin is speaking at the Brand Innovators Entertainment Marketing Summit during the Cannes Film Festival this week. We caught up with her from her office in New York to talk about breaking into the US streaming market, reaching fandoms and how her years at HBO helped prepare her for this role. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about your recent campaign and who you are trying to reach?
We talk about our aspirational target segment as the people that want to know about those hidden gems that really care about quality but watch a lot of different things. The main goal of any brand campaign is awareness. How do we spark curiosity about a brand that either you don’t know about or you have a preconceived notion about?
It was really leaning into the concept of that what British offers is quite familiar in a lot of ways. It’s still in English. It’s still genres that people relate to like mystery and crime, but it’s just told a little differently. There’s a strong sense of character development. There’s that unexpected range. It’s crafted with British storytelling in the writing. We have many book adaptations.
We partnered with an agency called Uncommon. We loved the fit because they’re a British export too. They’re pretty well known in the UK and they’re recently expanding into the US market. They understood right away that foreign but familiar concept and of course the concept of craft.
The idea was how do we show range and craft that became this ode to the craft. We did this one-take shot of showing an average viewer transitioning as she watches. You don’t know till the end, but as she’s watching all these shows, she transitions into the characters from the show. At the end, you realize that she’s on the couch and has been watching all along and moving through the various range of content from BritBox. It speaks to the immersive nature and the escape nature that a lot of our audience feels when they’re tuning into our stories.
Can you talk about the streaming market, where you sit and what the opportunities and challenges are?
We like to think of ourselves as the must-have complement. We know that everybody has Netflix, Amazon, maybe Paramount+. There’s lots of other big streamers that are in the market trying to appeal to the whole family. Our challenge is to break through the clutter. How do you break through in our constant digitally immersive world and show that there’s actually something special here that you can offer? Being a complement in some ways is almost like a privilege. We’re not trying to be everything for everyone. We think we offer something very unique and specialized, but we offer a lot of it in a very rich way.
If we can bring people in, we have an extremely loyal audience. We have excellent industry retention. Over half of our owned and operated customers are on an annual plan. We know that if we can introduce people, we have a great chance of really hooking them on this content. As a specialty streamer, we’re also self-differentiated, which helps with the clutter as well. We are the best of British. That’s a way to really differentiate ourselves in the eyes of the consumer.
Fans are passionate about their shows. How are you embracing the loyalty of fandoms to grow your reach?
We do a lot of listening to our consumers. They are very active about telling us what they think both on social comments and they email us. For example, we just just finalized our final season of 14 of Vera. We had consumers writing in, talking about how they couldn’t wait for the final season and how they were so sad to see it go. They were essentially writing love notes saying this is the best show ever. “I can’t believe I have to say goodbye to Vera. It makes me want to cry.” We leaned into that and solicited a bit more. We created a book of love letters from the fans and then presented it to the star of Vera and the creator and filmed their viewing of the book and shared that back to fans. Some of it is just embracing what the fans are already telling you.
We recently launched Towards Zero, which is a modern adaptation of an Agatha Christie story. It’s been hugely successful for us because there’s a huge fan base of mystery book readers. Brits do a lot of book-to-TV and film adaptations. To be able to show that story in a modern take and then to be able to have the catalog of other Christie adaptations, just by the nature of our content, is a way to build and grow that fandom. We have the largest catalog of Christie stories. We just announced a new one that’s coming. They come in for Towards Zero, but then they might watch an original, or they might watch Murder is Easy, the modern adaptation we did last year.
That’s a really good example of how the content can create stickiness. I know streamers are challenged with maintaining subscribers who quit once they have already watched a show. Are there other examples of how you’re trying to build that loyalty so that they stay?
We just recently premiered Ludwig Season 1, which is about an unexpected detective. It’s a puzzle maker turned detective who’s just trying to solve the disappearance of his twin brother. He acts like the detective, but along the way he’s solving crimes using his puzzle making techniques. It’s been wildly successful for us. We know Season 2 is coming. We’re thinking about ways to bring people on that journey. There’s other content that we have that speaks to those unexpected detectives. We’ll think creatively about what are those other shows that we can hook that audience in and tease some content as we get closer to Ludwig Season 2.
A lot of these shows have really long series runs, which is wonderful about British television. For example, with Blue Lights, which was a show we launched last year, we saw tremendous growth from Season 1 to Season 2. We think there’s still a lot of room to grow the audience ahead of Season 3. There’s an opportunity to engage the existing audience and help grow that.
You mentioned that there’s a connection with many of the shows being based on books. Are you doing any crossover marketing to try and reach book readers?
We often partner with the publisher of the actual IP, which we’ve done. We just did with Vera and Macmillan Publishers. We have a new show coming called Lynley that’s based on an existing IP in both books, as well as it was, it’s a reboot of a classic. There are lots of ways that we can partner with publishers to reach those fan bases. We definitely seek out book readers in a lot of our marketing, we do a lot of activations with Goodreads.
Can you talk about your background at HBO and how this helped shape what you’re doing today?
I was privileged to work with a brand like HBO and it taught me a lot. What HBO has done so successfully is really build brand identity and brand love. And not only that brand identity of what the brand stands for, but that sense of identity that the person who consumes that show feels that connection to that brand.
I see a lot of that in our fans today. We talk to our consumers all the time, either through customer service outreach or through surveys or through focus groups. There is this real sense of pride about being a BritBox fan and being in the know, being the one to tell their friend about a hidden gem. The opportunity to build that is definitely a playbook that I can learn from having been at HBO.
What are your favorite shows on the platform?
I loved Towards Zero. It is just one of the most beautiful shows we’ve ever done. You can’t beat Anjelica Huston and Matthew Rhys and the rest of the cast is just gorgeous too. I just started I, Jack Wright. I’m enjoying that. But my all-time favorite might be Shetland. It is a great detective crime story in the most beautiful setting.
