Virgin Media Originals
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
Campaign, social, film
The whole point of this brief was to prove Virgin Media could sit at the grown-ups’ table. Its UK business does not make its own television, but in 2019 it launched its most ambitious slate yet: two British shows, The Feed and The Rook, billed not as exclusives it had bought in but as Virgin Media Originals. My job was to build the content that made them land with customers and, just as importantly, proved the brand had real access to big shows and big stars.
Each series needed its own way in before any of that. The Feed was a near-future sci-fi drama built around a brain implant that lets people share thoughts and memories until, inevitably, it goes wrong. The Rook was a supernatural thriller of hidden powers, a shadowy organisation and a central mystery, with a genuinely heavyweight cast. So I built a content plan around each release, designed to hold customer interest across the run without burning it out, and flexible enough to cope with talent access we could not yet count on.
That access came, but on two very different terms, which meant two very different shoots. The Feed was still filming, so we were invited on set in Manchester to capture behind-the-scenes footage and interview the cast there. The Rook would be a junket day. I led the creative on both and was in the room for each, either interviewing or running the shoot to make sure we got what the plan needed.
The Feed was the hard one, and that is where being a journalist earned its keep. I have been on enough sets to know how little room a shooting schedule leaves for anything else, so I built a deliberately nimble approach: interview mechanics that could work in the gaps between takes and turnarounds, asking little of actors whose heads were quite rightly on their actual job. Proving the access through strong on-set footage, without getting in the way of a live shoot, was the same needle to thread.
The Rook was simpler to film but came with its own trap. Junket interviews are usually stale, actors giving rehearsed answers to questions they have heard all day, and ours needed to feel as ownable as the on-set access we had on The Feed. The upside of more time with the cast was more content, if we did something worth doing with it.
So I leaned into a video trend that was taking off in 2019 and moved the interviews away from the standard junket Q&A into gamified formats. For The Feed, we landed on two mechanics, a “would you rather” and a game built around the show’s own theme of online connection, plus a graphics package that matched its visual world. The “would you rather” worked so well that we reused it for The Rook, alongside an explainer film, “16 things to know about The Rook,” where I pushed the humour through the on-screen graphics rather than the talent answers. Around the interviews, we also handled the social and broadcaster asks, including pieces to camera that ran on the TV platform itself to drive customers to watch.
Each show then sat inside its own content ecosystem on Virgin Media Edit: previews, a cast who’s who, episode guides and the interviews themselves, all cut long for broadcast and YouTube and short for social.
What it shows: leading the creative on a landmark brand moment from strategy to shoot – devising the treatments, directing two very different filming days under real-world constraints, and turning access to talent into content customers actually wanted to watch.
