Summary
• Opal Telecom rebranding to TalkTalk Business leveraging parent company megabrand
• Legacy provider BT dominating the market but TalkTalk Business own technically superior network
• Campaign needed to overcome huge inertia and inspire beneficial but unnecessary action
• Engaging, amusing and delivering the strategic messaging to perfection, the Old Telecoms Giant is a truly stunning creative concept and execution.
• Probably the most complex B2B contact strategy ever devised
• Hugely successful campaign increased sales by six per cent
The client company
Opal Telecoms were not a widely recognised brand, but parent company TalkTalk’s brand is huge in home telecoms, so it made sense to leverage this and rebrand as TalkTalk Business. In doing so
TTB intend to become as large as TalkTalk ‘residential’ in three years. This is the ongoing objective for this campaign.
Opal was a young company and had experienced the upheaval of mergers and acquisitions. The staff lacked confidence in the brand so the strategy needed urgently to reflect and remedy this.
Strategy
TalkTalk Business (TTB) provides voice, broadband, mobile and system products and services to large and small UK businesses across the TalkTalk network. With a major shift in the services businesses consume traditional revenues are being eroded, replaced by ‘cloud’ based services. Throw in the fact TTB has no market awareness or brand strength, competing against BT, Virgin and Cable & Wireless, creates a tough marketing job. With no clear creative strategy and reactive product led communications, the market had no reason to place TTB against the likes of BT. A clear creative and communication strategy was required.
Objectives
The marketing campaign was designed to achieve the following:
• Create awareness in the market of the technical superiority of the TTB network and offerings.
• Highlight the implications of this for consumers of new applications such as cloud services.
• Draw attention to the shortcomings of the competition in the areas of price, customer service and technical delivery.
• Overcome the apathy of indifferent customers of more established providers and get them to switch to TTB.
Target audience
Potentially the target audience for this campaign is huge comprising of any business that consumes telecoms services. This presents a major challenge in terms of targeting and segmentation.
Media, channels, techniques
Research showed that following deregulation, businesses had been bombarded with marketing for telecoms providers and had learned to ignore it. If ever there was a need for a truly attention grabbing creative then this campaign demanded it.
Meet the Old Telecoms Giant. He represents everything that Opal/TalkTalk Business isn’t. We represented the competition directly by creating him out of old technology. We went through a process of sketches to decide the right characterisation. After deliberation, rather than a sorry-looking character simply unable to help his customers, we decided it would rouse more interest and be more fun if he was angry and deliberately not helping them. He’s slow to respond, gets annoyed when you want your business to be treated individually and has very little interest in new technology. This dictated the development of his shape to be large, cumbersome and inflexible.
After the sketch was finalised and signed off by the client, it was created in Maya software to make him 3D. Firstly as a mass test, then a model was created, to which we added texture and rigged to enable movement.
The Old Telecoms Giant amused, surprised and above all engaged, all who interacted with him. Through digital media, users were invited to see this antihero getting up to all sorts complacent, non-customer focused antics. Positive messages about the benefits of switching to TalkTalk Business were woven in, of course.
Timescale
The campaign began in mid 2010 and is ongoing.
Results
The results of our brand relaunch in association with IAS are impressive as you can see from these figures from the first year:
-Increased sales by six per cent
-Increased inbound leads by 30 per cent
-Increased awareness by 15 per cent
-Click through rates at a high of 11.2 per cent
-Online web conversion up by 28 per cent
Client Testinmonial
“When Craig Duxbury of IAS told me we should get one agency to plan all our marketing activities, I was highly sceptical. We had never done it before. One year on and I can’t see it being done any other way.”
Paul Higgins, CMO TalkTalk Business.
