We’re unabashed fans of CTAM’s “Thinking Out Loud” podcast, which features marketing association CEO Vicki Lins interviewing some of media’s top innovators to uncover how they tick. The latest episode features BritBox CMO Diana Pessin, who many may recognize from her more than 18 years at HBO, most recently as SVP of Media Strategy, Audience and Marketing Analytics.

Pessin joined BritBox in 2023 and was elevated last year to the CMO. The SVOD has about 4 million subscribers and serves up content from top UK producers and broadcasters to audiences in the U.S., Australia and the Nordic countries. In other words, it’s a much more niche service than HBO and she’s just fine with that.

“BritBox has been a profitable streamer for some time now, and up until recently, that wasn’t the goal of many of the larger mass streamers,” Pessin said during the half-hour episode. “We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. We’re not necessarily going to be something for every single person in your household the way the mass players are. We like to refer to ourselves as the must-have complement.”

Of course, with streamers on a constant quest to fill their content pipeline, there’s a growing amount of British content on some of the bigger players. But if anything, Pessin believes that actually helps BritBox, which is owned by BBC Studios. “It’s opening the eyes to consumers that this is actually something that might be interesting to them,” she said, noting that initially BritBox’s main audience leaned toward expats or anglophiles already very familiar with some of the content. “For us to really grow beyond that sort of core, we need to reach the people that might not think that they actually love British content. They don’t self-identify that way. So, a lot of it is opening the aperture and dimensionalizing what’s so special about British content.”

The upshot of that is a campaign that launched in mid-April dubbed “See It Differently,” which taps on the notion that there’s something surprisingly different about British content. BritBox is hoping “Outrageous,” which debuted late last month, will help bring in some of those new viewers. The original series explores the lives of the Mitford sisters, an aristocratic British family with six headstrong women who made (often scandalous) headlines around the world. “It’s not only dimensionalizing what British is, but it’s also erasing some of the misconceptions that British is only about Royals or it’s only for people who like to drink tea,” Pessin says. “It’s a modern take on a period story, which I think in some ways is how we’re trying to position the brand.” – Amy Maclean

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Effros: What’s In a Name?

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