Matalan partners with ITV for online show

Discount fashion retailer Matalan is embarked on a new marketing drive as it launches a new weekly online TV show in partnership with ITV. The campaign devised by Bartle Bogle Hegarty alongside production partner Atomised and digital media

agency Agenda21, has been developed to boost Matalan’s online traffic, which is anticipated to increase by three million users per week, and aims to make up for the retailers lack of presence on the high street.

The online TV show will showcase the fashion and homeware retailer’s products and will be hosted weekly on ITV.com and Matalan.co.uk by Closer magazine’s style editor Kat Byrne. The show will also be shown on Closer’s website alongside an eight-page advertorial in the magazine, which will appear weekly featuring the latest trends and fashion advice.

In addition, Matalan has also signed a deal with ITV’s This Morning’s Tuesday fashion segment, and it will be running the first in-programme branded strand, followed by a 90-second airtime spot previewing the weekly online TV show in a bid to increase traffic to its site.

The campaign began this week and will run into 2013. It follows a similar online broadcast by Shop Direct-owned Littlewoods earlier in the summer, which hosted a live show via its Facebook page featuring an exclusive collection by interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. That initiative boosted visits to the LLB pages of the Littlewoods site by 289 percent in comparison to first week traffic driven by similar launches.

Matalan marketing director Lee Pinnington said: “There is a pioneering and challenging spirit at the heart of everything we do at Matalan. We are applying that spirit to our marketing communications by brokering these unique deals directly with ITV and Bauer.

“We are working with them as business-building partners rather than thinking of them as just a supplier of media inventory.”

Image: Matalan’s host Closer style editor Kat Byrne