Together Incredible is the story of how New Zealand internet provider Orcon used live events and celebrity endorsement in an innovative way to create one of the most successful, and talked about campaigns of 2009/10 in New Zealand. Wanting to raise awareness of their faster broadband speed in a market that is heavily dominated by two major players (Vodafone and Telecom) Orcon needed a campaign that would punch far beyond its traditional media spend (currently only 2.5% of the sector). The solution was a world-first live event – a chance to re-record the classic track The Passenger, live, online, with the godfather of punk Iggy Pop. The idea was to find nine 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 result was that campaign became the story, generating greater value in unpaid editorial media coverage than purchased media space.

Prior to launch, we surprised 25 New Zealand journalists with personalized emailed video messages from Iggy, telling them about the campaign. This guaranteed huge interest in the story as it rolled out. The campaign then 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. We then linked up nine New Zealanders with Iggy in Miami, all over Orcon broadband connections. And over the course of a full day, we laid down a new version of The Passenger. From the footage gathered on the day, TVCs were compiled and run over the following months.

The campaign caused an explosion of interest the moment it launched, with national press, prime time current affairs TV shows, websites and blogs all over the world picking it up.Orcon’s got more than 3,500 new Facebook friends in just 2 weeks.More than 200 video auditions were uploaded 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, which carried through to the day of the live event.The PR coverage culminated on the evening the TVC was released with Campbell Live, New Zealand’s premier current affairs show, devoting a five minute segment to the story of the campaign,In total, the campaign generated more than NZ$650,000 of unpaid positive media coverage before the TV campaign itself ad had even run.And most importantly, after the second burst of TV had finished Orcon’s sales were running 30% above the same time the previous year.