Insight
When a mobile phone provider promises a new “value deal” consumers are already on high alert. Like most countries around the world, in Australia Telco’s aren’t known for their transparent offerings and hand on heart honesty when it comes to costs. Category credibility has been gradually eroded over the years through a combination of hidden charges in plans and packages and plenty of failed promises. Add to that the launch of some aggressive value upstarts like Boost and Amay-sim that were lowering entry points and redefining the notion of ‘value’ to consumers. The complexity in the market had left consumers cynical and skeptical at best.
Optus saw the opportunity to simplify things and cut out the crap. It devised a pre-paid offering with no wastage, no hidden gotchas, you simply pay for what you use. Transparent day-by-day itemised costs, removing any unnecessary wastage of money.
But the offering itself wasn’t going to be enough to convince a sceptical consumer. Pre-paid consumers were locked into a ‘monthly mindset,’ used to quantifying and evaluating text allowance, voicemail calls, data limits and the crucial 30 day window when you lose roll over credit. It needed customers to switch from their current mobile “package deal” mentality to thinking about their actual daily use. Only then could Starcom MediaVest get people to understand that Optus was the only Telco that didn’t allow them to pay over the odds.
It had to bring ‘daily value’ to life in a way that mattered to people.
Strategy
To demonstrate value the agency had to contextualise the product revolution. The pre-paid category, seen as a value offering, is an illusion driven by promises of big data, voice and text allowances, as your credit ticks down over 30 days. It needed to make “daily” a value consideration.
Relevance to the millennial audience is real world truths they care about, and are interested in. Additionally millennials move faster than brands therefore it was essential that it captured culture their speed.
Millennials don’t make calls on their mobile phone every day. But they do use social media on their mobiles every day, multiple times. In fact, Facebook apps on mobile phones are often checked more than five times daily (Sensis, 2013).
Highlighting their daily mobile usage could easily be integrated within their social media behaviours. Facebook, being their main forum for news consumption in all its guises, enabled Optus daily access to millennials, delivering real world truths in their language. But to 1) Deliver the importance of ‘Daily’ in a traditional value defined category (complex messaging); 2) be able to move at the speed of millennials; 3) be social in its approach to information (snack-able), it needed to be conversationally relevant, in a way that no one had ever done before.
The agency set out to “Start a Daily Revolution” on millennials terms; fast paced, in a space that felt natural and allowed for ongoing discussion and sharing. Optus created a unique association, in their news feed every day, with relevant content that allowed it to sense and respond to current trending topics (daily trends).
Optus was so closely aligned to what millennials were talking about every day within these networks that they started to recognise and value what the brand’s daily spin was. IT became the only brand actively endorsed in their news feed.
Execution
A core, devoted team would bring to life the daily spin idea. In a world first, Facebook allowed the brand full access to their trending feed - enabling the agency to leverage topics of interest as they emerged. Facebook’s API tool would deliver the previous 24 hours trending news at 9am each morning to the working team, the team would review the trends and remove any that were either overly negative or counter to brand philosophy. Remaining trends were then worked up into three creative executions, client approved, and the daily trend was then set live within the audience’s Facebook feed. This was all done inside five hour window, between 9am and 2pm. Monday-to-Friday it ran daily trends to drive awareness and consideration of the Optus daily plans, on the weekend it ran offers to drives sales.
‘Daily trends’ acted as the core element of the campaign, but wasn’t only resigned to Facebook alone; Nova Radio enabled mass communication of daily trends outside social media; Coles/Woolies supermarkets to strengthen key retailer relationship and bring daily trends to life via offers and access to extended databases.
Hard metrics applied to the performance of the specific social activities around likes, CTR, clicks, average reach based on previous social activity and category norms.
Results
The unique approach to social drove engagement, conversations and understanding of the transparent pre-paid offer, and achieved huge business success:
Awareness delivered a 10 point lift, smashing the 3 point target; it saw a 9 point lift in consideration, far surpassing a 1 point target; and remarkably achieved 42% increase in sales, more than quadrupling the 10% goal. The campaign delivered over 6,000 new Optus customers, a ROI of 7.6 to 1.
Hard social metrics were blitzed too. Weekly reach was 5m, vs target of 3.7m. Social engagement was reflected in an average CTR target of 0.60%, delivered average of 0.55% (best performing trends = 0.80%). The daily trends became social currency - 364 post shares, 6k+ page likes, 1,515 post comments, and 21,710 post likes.
Facebook’s head of Telco, technology and entertainment, Brent Annells, said that the campaign shows a new way of working with brands, adding that Optus is working in a way that “no other brand had yet worked.”
Optus, Karen Phipson, Director of Active Consideration “This innovative, targeted and contextual approach is key for us to connect with consumers. Daily Trending was a highly effective campaign and something that we will continue to develop moving forward.”