Orcon is a New Zealand Internet provider. They wanted to raise awareness of their faster broadband speed. The market is dominated by two major players (Vodafone and Telecom).

They needed a campaign that that would punch far beyond its media spend (currently only 2.5% of the sector).The solution was a product demonstration ad…but with a twist.

We created a world first event – A chance to re-record the classic track The Passenger, live online, with Iggy Pop.The idea was to find 9 New Zealanders, via online auditions. Then at an arranged time, link them all up to Iggy in his studio in Miami – using Orcon’s super-fast broadband.Through Orcon broadband, Iggy coached his musicians live online and orchestrated a brand new arrangement of his most famous track.The content captured was used to create campaign of TV ads that ran on national TV.

The campaign broke on Facebook, with simultaneous 15” TV spots, showing Iggy (on Skype) calling for musicians to get involved. Street posters (that looked like concert posters) also called for auditions.The entire auditions process ran through a specially created Facebook App. Here you could learn the music, learn the words, leave a video audition and go the gallery of auditions to browse and share.As the auditions flooded in, new TV spots ran with Iggy commenting on the auditions so far and encouraging more people to get involved.

The campaign caused an explosion of interest the moment it launched. It was picked up by national press, prime time current affairs TV shows, websites and blogs all over the world. Orcon’s put on 1000’s of friends in just 2 weeks.We received 200 video auditions in 10 days, which were viewed over 100,000 times.When the band members were announced, there was a second wave of media coverage. Including national TV, radio and newspaper interviews.The campaign generated over $650,000 of unpaid media coverage before the TV ad had even run.Before the campaign ran Orcon struggled to meet daily sales targets. After the second burst of TV had finished they are exceeding 3 to 4 times their daily sales target.