ITV Be is a new channel launched by ITV focused on programming and advertising targeting female audiences. ITV Be's advertising campaign uses stereotypical depictions of attractive women to appeal to aspirational desires of other women rather than heterosexual male desires. The advertising strategy focuses heavily on digital platforms like YouTube, social media, and websites which are commonly used by younger audiences. A consistent pink color scheme and focus on lifestyle programming featuring celebrities are used across all advertising to clearly brand ITV Be as a channel for young women.

1. ITV Be Research

2. ITV Be is a new channel that ITV have added as part of their institution that was put in
place to broadcast channels that focused on the female audience, with this shown
through the programming and also the extensive advertising campaign. ITV had to
create another cohesive marketing campaign alike with how they marketed the
relatively new channel ITV Encore, though ITV Be is a free-to-view channel, thus
meaning it had to depict ITV’s ethos due to them being a commercial broadcaster.
They needed to focus on image within their advertising and this is due to the fact that
advertisement will be concurrent within the channel, as well as the fact that females
are being aimed at through the advertisements because the programming focuses on
them – meaning that stereotypes are also important within the ITV Be advertising.
ITV Be’s advertising campaign opposes Laura Mulvey’s representation theory, in the
sense that although the female characters are depicted to be entirely glamorous, this
is not to please heterosexual males because that is not the gender audience for this
channel. Instead, it focuses upon the aspirational aspect because of the fact that
female’s are meant to see these advertisements and subsequently are meant to want
to appear as the women in the adverts, thus instead ITV Be follow the dominant
ideology theory of women looking after their appearance – as they are connoted as
attractive people to entice women that find solace within other female’s looks.

3. ITV Be was advertised in the same fundamental way as ITV
Encore, showing a cohesive marketing campaign due to the
way in which they are consistent across the entire ITV brand.
However, the concurrent aspect for ITV Be is the fact that they
are aiming at a young demographic female audience and this
is connoted through their advertising, with a predominant
focus upon digital advertising, as young audiences will
conventionally use media in order to extract information. This
depicts that ITV Be placed an integral importance upon
advertising their brand towards a specific audience in a way
that they would definitely see it, with YouTube clips and social
media creating a ‘hype’ about the channel, as well as several
television adverts shown throughout the flagship ITV channel
to engage the audience with the channel.

4. Digital Methods

5. Digital Methods
The focus was placed upon digital methods of advertising because of
the fact that a younger demographic audience would typically become
an active audience by extracting information from the use of social
media and web 2.0. The television adverts for ITV Be were very
effective and this is due to the fact that they were shown on the
flagship ITV channel, meaning that people who are already loyal to the
ITV brand will move over to the new channel that is part of the
institution. ITV Be use their stereotypes within their advertising on
social media and this is demonstrated through the pink colour scheme
that is shown within their website, as well as their advertising and also
colours on their Twitter page. Although this is very stereotypical, it is
entirely effective in representing that this channel is being aimed at a
young female audience, even without the programming being shown,
with the colour bright a vibrant pink to highlight the female audience
because conventionally they will be drawn to the consistent colour
scheme across the entire ITV Be brand.

6. Digital Methods
The Only Way is Essex was an extremely successful flagship show that received very
high ratings for ITV 2, but due to the fact that ITV Be needed a factor that would
effectively stand-out for the audience, ITV decided to move this flagship show to the
new channel – in order to depict this is the most important aspect of the new channel.
Media synergy is shown within the products as well as the simple information about
the channel launch and then also the mantra for the channel of ‘life worth sharing’.
The synergy is represented through links to lots of social networking features to allow
the young audience that is aimed at the primarily see of the information about the
channel, with ‘#ITVBe’ connoted as well because this relates to the success of
‘#TOWIE’, which was one of the most integral social media aspects for ITV because it
allowed a young demographic of audience to subsequently get involved within the
channel – so ITV wanted to continue this trend. Television advertisements not only
included the main information about the channel like the logo, time that the channel
will be launched and then the channel number, but also a website in which the
audience can navigate towards so that they can find out more information. This
depicts that web 2.0 was a prevalent factor for ITV for the new channel because of the
fact that young people will see all of the new information by using new media
technology – with this allowing a young demographic to see the advertising, but the
use of stereotypes mean that a female audience will be enticed towards the brand.

7. Brand Identity
All of these adverts were consistent with each other in a number of
ways and this is something that is also very important, as creating a
brand identity will make sure that the audience become synonymous
with the ITV logo and with the logo of the new channel. The colour
scheme and logo of the ITV Be channel uses a pink colour which
demonstrates the female audience as I have aforementioned because
the pink colour indicates gender played a fundamental part in
advertisements. Appearing as bright and vibrant is integral for ITV Be,
with the name of the channel itself indicating that the audience has the
opportunity to be themselves and it makes them feel like a valued
audience – hence aiming at the psychographic audience of aspirers due
to the programming of flagship reality television celebrities and then
explorers as they seek individualism.

8. Ideas for Inclusion
We see ITV Be as a very powerful figure for our own channel because it is a
new channel which means that I have been exposed to all of the types of
advertisements that have been very effective because I am totally aware
about the information of the channel itself. However, we will be subverting
from aiming towards one specific gender as we want our audience to be a
masss audience and therefore signalling our brand towards both male and
female audiences will be most effective for our own brand, though ITV Be
helped us to understand the importance of stereotypes within branding. We
also want to use web 2.0 with the website but then also synergy by including
website links on our newspaper advert because this simply allows the
audience to find our more information for themselves by simply promoting
the identity of a new channel. We were able to learn that young demographic
audience see web 2.0 as absolutely pivotal because they will extract the
information from the internet in order to subsequently be engaged within the
brand identity of the channel and this is something that we will look to follow
also with our combination of advertising.