Essence Launches ITV’s Love Island 2021 Series with Picnic’s Swipe Format

ITV has worked with Essence and Picnic to drive awareness for this year’s series of Love Island via their latest social display format. 

Inspired by popular dating apps, the award-winning swipe format allows users to ‘couple up’ with their favourite contestants with a swipe right to like function. Once liked, users could click out to ITV Hub from the familiar ‘It’s a Match’ card.

Aligning with Love Island’s dating theme, the interactive swipe format proved to be highly appealing to users. The creative generated a total engagement rate over double the format’s benchmark figure, and achieved over five card swipes per user on average. 

After a year’s hiatus following Covid-19, the success of the launch was illustrated with 1 million ITV Hub viewers across the inaugural episode constituting a new launch record for the series, and 2.9 million streams in total. Views were also up 110,000 from the previous series among the 16-34 age range.* 

Matthew Goldhill, CEO of Picnic, says: “This is our first campaign with ITV and the high levels of engagement prove the power of social display as a marketing channel. The format aligned well with the tone of Love Island, helping to build brand equity in a relevant and engaging way, without annoying users.”

Matthew Russell, client director at Essence, says: “Operating at the cutting edge of media innovation, it's important to us at Essence to collaborate with partners that help deliver unique, engaging and authentic media solutions. The swipe format developed by Picnic has grabbed the attention of Love Island audiences in a compelling and interactive way ensuring our campaign for ITV generated positive dwell times and high engagement rates.”

*Source:https://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-releases/huge-viewing-night-itv-136m-watch-love-island-launch-and-euro-2020