Proximus has to work on brand love and preference and does so by demonstrating how technology and connectivity can make our lives better. The big challenge within that is that technological innovations aren’t something we automatically connect with on an emotional level. Technology is even seen as a disruptor of human connections. We had to bring technology closer to our lives, showing how it connects us all. Around Mother’s day we decided to show this by getting everyone to call their moms. Choosing radio as the medium because it gave us the reach, possibility to use an innovative approach to encouraging calls and an element of surprise triggering voice activation to get people to call their moms.

Around Mother’s day we decided to show how smartphones can connect us better by playing on the insight that all mother’s would like their children to call them more often, especially on their special day. We used the insight that all Belgians calls it’s mother “mom” (mama in Dutch, maman in French) even in the address book of their phones. So we created a radio asset that triggers voice activation in order to get all phones near a radio to call mom.

Belgian telco leader Proximus is the player that invests most in the quality of their network. In order to sell a higher quality of network Proximus needed to show people who aren’t early adopters of technology that technology can connect us in a better way. In order to get more people to experience technology for the better we wanted to get more people to not forget to call their mother on Mother’s day. So we chose to air on national radio at a moment of big reach: we planned to have our radio assets to air on Mother’s day with a reach of 1,5 Million listeners.

On Mother’s Day we reminded Belgians about the fact that they probably love their mother so much that they also call her mom in the address book of their phone. Followed by a demonstration of vocal activation technology in the commercial: “OK Google, call mom” or “Hey Siri, call mom”.

The day after we remind forgetful people with a wink about Mother’s Day the day before, offering them to help calling their mom via voice activation like the version on Mother’s Day.

The campaign ran nationwide for 2 days on all major radio stations centered around periods where people are likely to be driving their car.

- 1,5 million Belgians heard the commercial

- For 900.000 listening to a radio commercial was turned into talking when their mom was called automatically. It created direct experiences of how Proximus uses innovations to connect us more meaningfully.

- This means our radio asset with a reach of 1,5 million listeners created a direct emotional experience for 1,8 million people.

- It also means we have reached 54% of mothers whose children have left the family home! (Source: Statbel. Based on the number that there are 1.681 166 mothers with children of at least 25 years old in Belgium (26 is the average age children leave their parental homes.)