UPDATE Superfast Broadband Delivery UK Project Starts TV Advertising

As expected the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, which with BTOpenreach’s help hopes to make fixed line superfast broadband (24Mbps+) services available to 95% of the population by 2017, will tonight launch a major new TV advertising campaign in the hopes of boosting take-up

According to Campaign, which was spotted by Thinkbroadband, the TV advert opens by saying, “Welcome to the superfast nation. Now’s the time to get superfast broadband” and later redirects viewers to get more information by visiting gov.uk/gosuperfast (this in turn links to various postcode availability checkers run by BTOpenreach, Virgin Media and KC [Hull only]). Various related promotions across the press, radio and other sectors will follow.

Chris Townsend, CEO of BDUK, said:

“Our rollout is on track with 1.5 million homes and businesses now having access, but evidence suggests that many consumers and small businesses don’t know that superfast broadband is available in their area, or what they need to do to take up the service. That’s why we were keen to work with Enter on a multi-channel marketing campaign to raise awareness, highlight the benefits and support take-up.

The new team at Enter has given us an exciting and vibrant ad which we think will have real cut through with our target audience.”

The move follows concern that take-up of the new service has remained low, which is often put down to a lack of availability awareness. But such issues could also be due to the higher prices of FTTC/P, consumers being locked into long contracts with their existing ISP, a lack of general interest (i.e. if you have a decent ADSL2+ speed then you might be less inclined to rush for FTTC/P) and concerns over the ease of migration etc.

Fostering take-up is also important as many contracts contain a claw-back clause (e.g. take-up above 20% in some projects may start to trigger a return of some public investment), which could be used to further improve superfast broadband coverage in other areas or upgrade existing services. We covered this a lot in our recent article – First BDUK Fuelled BT “Fibre Broadband” Take-up Figures Emerge.

Never the less a general deployment scheme, as opposed to a more commercial demand-led approach, will always take longer to mature and any additional advertising is sure to help.

UPDATE 16th Dec 2014

In case you didn’t catch it yet, here’s what the TV advert looks like.