Culture moves at an incredible pace that traditional creative processes can’t live with. Enter the Virgin Media Newsroom – a multi-disciplined team of strategists, creatives, designers and videographers with a hotline to the client and a mission to create content at the speed of culture.

There were two strands to the Newsroom. The first a pre-planned ‘business as usual’ approach where the brand had something to announce, such as the start of the new TV series.

The second was real time reactive content responding to trending news stories and online buzz, like when Halo 5 launched and Beyonce (and her song Halo) was trending.

Overall we achieved 921% higher community growth than our competitors, achieved through a huge 76% increase in social engagement. On Facebook we saw 2.2x more engagement YoY, achieved through dramatic increases: +85% likes, +20% comments but vitally +310% in shares. Twitter saw +3.6x engagement YoY with a 70% increase in CTR. Engagement was 5x the UK average for 52% of the average UK cost (per engagement).

Our greatest success in real-time engagement appeared through the live tweeting of an Eastenders plot twist. 1.4m impressions (1m organic) were generated via an engagement rate of 13% and 4,800 retweets of our content.