Channel 4 News approached 4creative with a challenge to engage 16-34 year olds in a new, exciting and innovative way. A compulsory requirement from Ofcom, driven by the fact that fewer youngsters are watching the news on TV (across any channel).
We broke it down to what we felt young people like to share online and felt GIFs were a great way of delivering headlines in a fun, interesting way, providing a quick overview of a story, that can be easily digested and then shared.
Each news story is condensed into a GIF. Hosted on a bespoke Tumblr site optimised for mobile. Each GIF works with a headline and imaginative imagery to get the story and tone across in a matter of seconds. Users can then click to read more. If the story has engaged them enough, they can even continue further, linking through to the conversation on Twitter or to the full in depth story on the Channel 4 News website.
Users can also share the GIFs easily on social media and each GIF is posted on 4NewsWall's social accounts - meaning subscribed users could get the News in GIFs directly in their newsfeed.
We also ran daily bulletins across Channel 4 and E4 using the GIFs of the day so that 16-34's could get a quick overview of the news, and share their favourites from their second screen device.
4NewsWall is the first of its kind and in its first month reached over 4million people on social media. The site also got a click through rating 3 times higher than the average with an incredibly low bounce rate of 4.2%, which basically means when people came to the site, they stuck around.
