Using celebrity guests to increase reach for moneysupermarket.com

Harnessed the pull of a popular celebrity to generate interest in a series of webcasts from moneysupermarket.com

Challenge:

• Combining the use of a celebrity guest with the latest live online webcast to generate consumer interest and increase public awareness of the series of webcasts hosted by moneysupermarket.com.

Solution:

• “The Beeny factor” - Sarah Beeny was chosen as the celebrity expert to promote the webcast. The combination of her celebrity status and being a well known expert in the property industry helped to unlock sites that had not previously taken webcasts and enabled us to publicise her appearance widely.
• Sarah Beeny was used as a pull to attract consumers as she was considered to have a communication style that would be able to connect with the ‘man on the street’.
• The live event served as a call to action for consumers to consider house and mortgage costs and to gain valuable advice from an industry expert.

Implementation

• Having built the webcast page, Lansons Live were able to use Sarah Beeny's celebrity status to expand on the number and type of syndication partners that would normally be interested in a personal finance webcast.
• moneysupermarket.com editor, Clare Francis presented the webcast putting the hot topics to Sarah Beeny live from the Lansons Live studio. Clare asked a combination of questions that had been received from websites during the sell-in by Lansons Live in the lead into the webcast as well as a flurry of questions that came in as a response to Sarah's comments during the live half hour.
• Sarah was asked a variety of questions covering issues including home improvements, valuing a house, buy-to-let mortgages and where she expects the next property hotspots to be.

Outcome:

• Over 1,000 consumers viewed the live webcast half hour, with 775 questions being submitted by online users. In addition, almost 3,000 extra viewers have since watched the event on demand - more than five times as many viewers as the previous month's moneysupermarket.com's webcast.
• A total of 25 websites promoted the webcast including MSN, Telegraph, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and - for the first time - Reuters and thelondonpaper. Furthermore, this became Lansons Live's first webcast to go viral with several sites and online users discussing the event via Twitter.
• Will Miller from Sarah Beeny's property website, Tepilo.com: "The webcast was fantastic - we were very pleased and incredibly impressed - I'm a great fan"