Supercharging streaming growth with Jobs to be Done.
ITV needed to identify which high-commercial-value viewers to target for growth, what it would take to meet their needs, and how to align marketing, editorial and digital experience around them. Discover our solution.
The insight challenge
With linear audiences declining and nearly half the population disengaged from ITV in a typical week, the growth of ITVX was crucial to the brand’s future.
ITVX launched in November 2022, replacing ITV Hub with a fresh service backed by £165m of investment, a step change in ITV's digital strategy. It was a chance to attract new audiences and shift perceptions beyond catch-up TV. The launch campaign was a huge success, but there was still ground to gain on competitors and a large non-ITV-viewing audience still to win over.
Delivering on that opportunity meant getting marketing, editorial and digital experience at ITVX aligned around a single strategy, no small task when each team had a different view on what mattered most, and with a backlog of deprioritised work still to address.
“Marketing needed to gain an in-depth understanding of how we could design our activities against the highest value future audiences, activate those opportunities and then observe segment-level change to measure effectiveness.”
Director of Media and Capability
“The Product team needed inspiration to understand which features and propositions on ITVX could add the most growth... we needed a segmented view of the viewers based on the emotional, functional and social jobs that they hire ITVX for.”
Director of Product, Growth
The solution
A 360 degree view of the public’s relationship with ITV and the broader video market was required to meet the needs of the business. This required a scope of research no single technique could tackle, spanning primary qual and quant, first-party and third-party solutions.
We designed a highly ambitious two-workstream insight programme that fused ethnographic research to surface Jobs-to-be-Done, segmentation to identify targetable territories, and first and third-party data across 7,000+ viewers.
Workstream 1: Value to ITV audiences
The primary research phase required an actionable understanding of what really drives streaming and TV viewing choices, using Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory. This phase needed to go beyond the Needs-based solutions that had fallen short in the past to really zone in on what influences choice in the moment as well as initial sign-up.
Starting from scratch
We set aside existing assumptions and began fresh. Ethnographic research, including a week-long "TV switching diary" (800+ entries), an insight sprint community plus exploratory interviews, surfaced and explored over 100 distinct Jobs shaping viewer behaviour.
Prioritising what matters
Using MaxDiff analytics and an Outcome-Driven Innovation framework, we narrowed this list down to the 25 JTBD with the greatest impact on audiences.
Segmenting the market
We used these findings to cluster viewers into seven distinct groups, mapping which Jobs mattered most to each, and where the biggest growth opportunities lay.
Bringing the segments to life
For each group, we built detailed Personas, combining user interviews with AI-enhanced diary analysis. These went beyond simple pen portraits, giving ITV teams a practical toolkit that captured pain points, Switching Forces, and the emotional, social and contextual factors behind each Job.
Workstream 2: Value to ITV
Valuing individual streaming users isn't straightforward. ITV doesn't earn revenue directly from viewers, and advertising income shifts with market demand, sometimes in counterintuitive ways.
Defining value for ITV
No previous work at ITV had tackled this question, but it was critical for the project to ensure any initiatives from the research were focused on the audience’s that matter most to ITV.
Partnering with the ITV Insight group, who ran internal workshops and stakeholder interviews, we analysed first- and third-party data, then collaborated on a definition of value. A consistent lens way to understand where value sits across its audience, and a model that could be applied to their broader data sets.
Bringing it all together
Once both workstreams were complete, we fused Value for ITV with Value for Audiences into one data source, enriched with existing profiling and context (ITV first-party data, YouGov Profiles, ITV trackers). For the first time, ITV could see how commercial value and audience needs actually connected.
For each group, we built detailed Personas, built from user interviews, diary analysis and in-depth audience profiling. These went beyond simple pen portraits, giving ITV teams a practical toolkit that captured pain points, Switching Forces, and the emotional, social and contextual factors behind each Job territory.
Jobs-to-be-Done was central to our approach
A Job-to-be-Done is the underlying goal that shapes someone's needs and choices in a given situation. People “hire” the products and brands that help them get a Job done well, and drop or don’t choose the ones that don't.
Most brands look inward, asking what their product needs to compete. JTBD flips this, starting with people: what are they trying to accomplish, and how can we help them succeed? The Job, not the product, defines the real market. For example, 'Streaming TV' is a product category. 'Watch the shows I love, whenever I want' is a Job to be Done, and it endures while the solutions around it keep changing, from broadcast TV, to on-demand boxsets, to free ad-supported streaming.
Jobs operate at different levels, and each one guides a different kind of decision:
Aspirational
For people: The bigger ambition I'm ultimately trying to fulfil, e.g. "Make the most of my free time and budget with content I can easily find and enjoy."
For brands: Defines the real category and territory you operate in (and your competition).
Big
For people: The main goals I'm working towards along the way, e.g. “Easily find content that matches my current mood without causing frustration.”
For brands: The principal opportunities for growth and differentiation.
Emotional & social
For people: How I want to feel (e.g. “Create moments of peace.”), and how I want to be seen (“e.g. Be the friend with great taste.”)
For brands: Shapes content, messaging and brand experience.
Functional
For people: Specific, actionable needs, e.g. “Easily save and recall content that looks good to watch at a later time.”
For brands: highlight opportunities for product features, service enhancements.
Outcomes
The project reshaped how ITVX approached growth, influencing decisions across commercial, product, marketing and content teams.
Rather than hand over a set of recommendations, we worked with ITVX through workshops to frame the JTBD findings as growth territories, giving their teams ownership of the ideas that came from them. Personas and qualitative insight gave these workshops a strong evidence base, and any ideas that surfaced early were used to spark further thinking, with several becoming live initiatives (e.g. ‘Remind me’ features, Trailers for upcoming shows, ‘Deep dive’ pages for priority shows).
The further outcome has been a shared, audience-led roadmap that ITVX's teams have aligned behind, along with a restructure of the product organisation around the viewer journeys that matter most. This has fed into how ITVX measures brand performance and understands audience value.
The project was also shortlisted for the Market Research Society awards in 2025 for ‘Applications of research’.
“These two segmentations ensure that we are building propositions and features that not only appeal to the core needs of our viewers but they will also deliver the greatest value back to ITV.”
Direct of Product, Growth, ITVX
“We were so impressed with Waveform’s ability to understand our insight requirements and their vast experience... they helped us land an extremely complex project.”
Senior Insights Manager, ITVX
