Planet Earth III is one of the BBC’s biggest natural history series ever made. Seventeen years after the first ground-breaking release of Planet Earth, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, the third and final series in this epic franchise chapter was to be BBC Studios most ambitious project. Boasting the highest location number and most prestigious state-of-the-art technology to date, this 8-part series is a culmination of 4.5 years of filmmaking.
While BBC Earth has a strong core fanbase, a lazer focus was put on vertical video for reaching a new, younger audience, many of whom weren’t even born when first installment was aired. Bitesizeable, vertical video content being the key lever in BBC Earth ecosystem.
We created a series of short edits for TikTok & Insta reels, adapting material with an edit style which was a far cry from the programme. For a TikTok, audio-first approach, much consideration was given to the carefully selected music & sound fx from within app. We created a tone of voice that was more playful but while doing so we still retained the core principles of the brand, with iconic storytelling and without diminishing the premium nature of the films.
These 3 examples from the campaign fed on insights that rare, behind-the-scenes exlusives were a huge pull for this audience. We wanted to draw them into this incredible and unreachable natural world – making it both relatable and awe-inspiring all at the same time. We understood humour would be the best route to engagement.
The campaign was a huge success with this small sample of videos pulling in over 8.5m views & over 400k engagements alone.
The sentiment was sky high with comments praising the channel and the series. In addtion we then utilised the TikTok feature to reply to comments with video - the programme managers were prepped with content with which to reply to some of the top rated comments. They connected and rewarded viewers for engaging, conversing by posting further video content which amplified their comments, The example below garnering a further 10.7k views & 800 more engagements.
