TalkTalk is the UK’s biggest phone and broadband provider. It decided to sponsor The X Factor, the UK’s biggest TV singing contest to establish its new brand positioning as ‘The Brighter Phone and Broadband Company’.

The key challenge was to turn a broadcast exercise (TV idents) into an engagement campaign.X Factor fans love performing and fame, so we asked them to perform for a chance to become famous and star in the ad breaks of their favourite TV show.

We created Brightdancing as an exciting new way to perform: going online, people could dance in front of their webcams holding a light source (anything form a phone to a torch) and create moving light shapes. Every week the best performances were chosen to become TV ads.

During the course of the campaign there were more than 42,000 video performances created on the site. Over 700,000 site visits, and more than 8,000,000 page views. 200 people were chosen to star on their own TV ads. TalkTalk sales went up 17% as a result of the activities undertaken during the sponsorship period.

The user generated light drawing videos were the main content of the site. The key design challenge was making something that looked beautiful but accommodated all the different textures and variations of what users’ would create at home.We wanted their creativity to come through in the performances, and not bury the videos in clutter.We built a dynamic grid around the videos and created an interface that is minimalistic without being cryptic, then punctuated the whole experience with smooth transitions that always reverted back to the same space.