ITV2’s summer hit show Love Island has now ended. With more viewers than ever before, the show is an advertiser’s dream.

Media Agency Group (MAG) had five clients involved in the show: ISawitFirst.com, Badi App, Oh Polly, Never Fully Dressed and Spectrum Collections.

Steve Crawley, Senior Account Director at MAG wraps up all the key stats and takeaways from this year’s show…

Love Island

Love Island is over for another year and many of us are left with a void on our weekday evenings.

Love it or loathe it, there is no denying that the ITV2 show is a hit with audiences and a winner for the brands associated with it. After forty-one episodes, Love Island averaged 4.3m TV viewers.

A further 1.4m viewers watched on Non-TV devices, taking the total average audience up to a great 5.7m viewers.

This is currently up by +0.6m viewers year-on-year. The show has continued to grow, and this series has averaged 4,243,000 viewers per episode (beating last years’ 4 million), with the best episode peaking at 4,705,000 viewers.

Aside from the TV viewership, the attention on social has been huge with Love Island achieving #1 rank status every day on Twitter for every day of the series making the show a true cultural phenomenon.

The core target audience for Love Island is millennials – 16-34-year-olds – an audience who regularly consume content on various devices and are very difficult for brands to truly engage effectively with.

However, when it came to Love Island, this audience gravitated towards watching the show religiously every evening as it aired in real-time and using mobile devices to engage in social media conversations, making it the perfect platform to advertisers to engage with this audience to drive down the purchase funnel.

TV brand collaborations have never been as strong and with such an engaged audience that Love Island provide night-on-night, we were confident that taking our clients ISAWITFIRST.COM, Oh Polly, Spectrum Collections, Never Fully Dressed and Badi App – would be beneficial for the brands in the long-term.

The fashion partnership for ISAWITFIRST.COM exceeded expectations for all of us – with a 67% increase in sales month on month following its collaboration. (stats attributed to Drapers: http://bit.ly/2yjIA99 July 2019 )

Throughout this series, female contestants wore the latest looks from Manchester-based fast-fashion house ISAWITFIRST.COM’s summer collection – as part of the fashion placement partnership.

In addition, the collaboration incorporated TV adverts around the show using well-known phrases such as “I got a text”, social amplification and click-to-buy mechanics on the Love Island App. It truly was an all-encompassing partnership to monopolise on the huge fame and reach of the show.

To really focus on driving consumers to purchase their favourite looks from the show, the product placement items are featured on the Love Island app.

I Saw it First has recorded a 60% increase in traffic week on week on average since the programme started on June 3rd and a “considerable” spike in traffic from 9pm when Love Island airs.

In addition to the fantastic growth of sales and traffic, I Saw It First has also had a 254% increase in Instagram followers since the first episode and Twitter followers are up 61%, which will no doubt be great for future sales from the influx of new fans of the brand.

ITV recently announced a second series of the hit show with Winter Island and it will be fascinating to see if engagement with audiences is as successful as the Summer show.

One thing is for sure – the show certainly has the power to engage and influence an audience of aspirational millennials, who religiously engage with the programme night after night.