Over the past few years, Sky has faced new challenges from emerging competitors offering aggressively priced TV packages. So the challenge was to evolve its TV planning to maximise efficiency and impact as it worked towards its goal of ten million households by the end of this year. Sky has tended to use audiovisual media (supported in press and online) to drive emotional engagement and affinity with the Sky brand; plus direct response TV and other direct channels to generate efficient response.

To drive emotional engagement and affinity with the Sky brand.

Econometric insights from MediaCom identified optimum frequencies for different types of campaign message over time - thus a recalculation of budgets for direct response media, based on optimal acquisition curves for each channel.

The result was that the proportion of the direct budget invested in DRTV increased from 9 per cent in 2006 to 16 per cent in 2009. Channel mix also evolved to target increasingly important audience segments - for instance, the 50-plus age group; and, in Sky's 2009 HD campaign, it was, for the first time, talking to Sky customers as well as prospects, so it added extra channels indexing well in those homes.

As a result, TV return on investment has more than doubled since 2007; the proportion that TV contributes to media-driven sales is also increasing; and DRTV and brand TV continues to be the most efficient sales-driving channels in the media hierarchy. "MediaCom has helped us to evolve Sky's TV planning and buying over the last three years across both brand and DRTV to deliver an excellent return to the Sky business," Steve Beckett, BSkyB's head of media planning, says.