How Honcho Utilised Love Island for Links

Love or hate it, Love Island has the majority of the nation in a chokehold. With the final looming, what better time to take advantage of the conversation?

Initial ideas were around predicting who would be this year’s finalists based on factors like public opinion on socials and which couples had been in the bottom three, tracking this against previous years.

After researching and keeping track of Love Island coverage, we decided it was better to opt for data that would predict how well this year’s finalists would do in terms of brand deals and earnings once they leave the villa.

Bringing the idea to life with data

Using the Inbeat Instagram Money Calculator, we found out just how much each contestant could request per sponsored Instagram post based on key metrics including follower count and engagement rate.

Then, we took a look at their occupations before they entered the villa, and their estimated finishing place based on bookies favourites.

The importance of adaptability

Our original plan had been to find trends and include contestants over a 5 year period. However, our data didn’t give us a clear method of correlating the data with predictions of who would come out on top in terms of opportunities, so...we pivoted.

Throughout the process, we kept our eye on the news cycle to make sure we had a relevant hook, deciding instead to focus on the islander’s previous occupations and average hourly wage, and how many hours they would’ve had to work to earn the equivalent of their sponsored Instagram post rate.

How did we outreach this?

We worked fast, and targeted publications that had provided an ongoing commentary throughout Love Island Season 8.

We changed up our subject lines to reflect the way the journalists we were targeting wrote theirs.

We paid attention to the sentiment of tweets about contestants on Love Island to understand who the fans were most interested in hearing about.

We played on the financial angle of the campaign and related this to the Islander’s previous occupations to make the story more relatable to the journalist’s target audience.

“Reactive ideas often feel natural, it’s about responding to something that’s happening in the news cycle or popular culture and offering your take on it.

Creativity and speed are equally important, the process can’t be too complex at the sacrifice of timeliness, otherwise you’ll miss the boat. Focusing on what’s interesting is the best way to capture attention.” - Schaunagh Gleeson, Digital PR Specialist, Honcho

"When it comes to outreach, we're constantly making sure we're in the loop with any new releases by utilising industry research every morning, and keeping track of campaigns we've already outreached to see if there's a way we can refresh our work and relate it to the current news cycle.

Google Alerts are a fantastic way of keeping up to date with any news relating to our client's work, too." - Ella Grappy, Digital PR Specialist, Honcho