Inside MTV's plan to reach new audiences with 'The Hills' revival's marketing, from singer Natasha Bedingfield to Google insights
- MTV CMO Jacqueline Parkes told Business Insider how her team worked with Google's insights lab to introduce its revival of "The Hills" to new audiences.
- The network's marketing team targeted audiences on social media who enjoyed similar reality TV and docuseries, but weren't already watching "The Hills."
- Parkes called them "social Sophies" because they liked to be a part of the social conversation and were drawn to programming around fashion, dating, and reality TV.
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When MTV premiered "The Hills: New Beginning" in June, the network wanted the reality-TV revival to be more than just a nostalgia play.
MTV had been working since 2016 to restore its reputation among the teens and young adults who had been its core audience. It was pursuing more than the millennials who grew up watching "The Hills" and its predecessor "Laguna Beach" in the 2000s.
To sell the show to a broader audience, MTV targeted viewers who enjoyed other reality and docuseries that were similar to the "The Hills."
"We call them social Sophies," Jacqueline Parkes, CMO of MTV, VH1, CMT, and Logo, and EVP of Viacom's Digital Studios, told Business Insider, using an internal, alliterative term. "They like to be a part of the social conversation. They like fashion, dating, reality TV."
Parkes' marketing team used social, digital, and paid media to target this broader reality-TV fan base with promotions for "The Hills."
Working with Google's insights lab to test content on YouTube, MTV found that "The Hills" theme song, "Unwritten," resonated with audiences, regardless of whether they had seen the show.
"The song was one of the biggest strategic levers that we had creatively to bring everybody in," Parkes said.
MTV partnered with artist Natasha Bedingfield and social music app Smule to record a version of the song that fans could sing along with and share across social channels.
Thousands of people participated in the #SingwithNatashaBedingfield campaign, Parkes said.
Then, the week ahead of June 24 premiere of "The Hills," a group of young men - who were almost certainly too young to have watched the series when it first aired - got in on the challenge. Their video went viral on Twitter with more than 10.5 million views.
Parkes also found that reality-TV fans who hadn't watched "The Hills" were connecting most to scenes from the show that portrayed relatable life moments, such as a first job or a break up. The marketing team leaned on clips from "The Hills" that had these emotional pulls.
"People that didn't know the story, that didn't know the characters, were brought in through those quintessential life moments," Parkes said. "That anchored our creative."
The first metric Parkes looks at when evaluating TV shows is the percentage of the audience watching for the first time. A healthy benchmark is 10% to 12%, she said. For the premiere of "The Hills: New Beginnings," it was 24% - close to the 25% the "Jersey Shore: Family Vacation" spin-off had.
- Read Business Insider's full story on how MTV marketed its recent revivals:
- MTV's CMO describes how she built hype around revivals of 'The Hills' and 'Jersey Shore,' and the network's turnaround effort under Chris McCarthy