Skinny should have been killing it. With the best prices, a world-class network and award-winning service. But years of erratic short-term retail campaigns had resulted in stagnation of customer numbers, revenue and all brand metrics.

The Problem: Outgrown & Out of stock

We were known as the telco for teenagers. More than a third of our customers were under 35. We were cheap, without the cheerful.

Success would come in a simple, linear fashion, with objectives to match.

We needed people to trust us (lift our network credibility from 34% to 38%).

We needed them to consider us (increase consideration by 2pp each year).

We needed them to join us and then stay (reduce churn by 5% each year).

And we needed them to stay longer and spend more (increase revenue per customer/ARPU by +2%).

The telecommunications market in New Zealand is highly regulated and extremely competitive. Spark New Zealand is one of the two largest players in this market, and in 2012 it created Skinny as a sub-brand, designed for the youth market. Over time, Skinny has tried to evolve into a mass market brand, but it has never been able to shake its telco-for-teenagers roots. Its consideration is significantly lower than the other three major competitors, and has proved stubborn to shift (Source: TRA Brand Tracking).

Skinny’s brand promise is to keep prices low and customers happy. We find ingenious ways of saving customers money. Historically, we’ve used local New Zealanders who share names with A-list celebrities. We’ve also turned our customers into 'Friend-vertisers'. But the success of our previous campaigns had become a rod for our own back, with the business expecting the high growth numbers of our past work in order to keep investing in Skinny. We couldn’t compete on spend, we didn’t have big budgets, and we couldn’t afford expensive media. In a recessionary environment, we needed a new execution of our brand philosophy that wouldn’t cost the earth to produce and would demonstrate our brand promise.

Enter...'Phone It In'

We got everyday New Zealanders to star in Skinny’s latest campaign, convincing other New Zealanders to Get the Skinny.

We outsourced our campaign to regular New Zealanders. To do this, we wrote a set of unique radio scripts on OOH posters for people to record telling other New Zealanders to 'Get the Skinny', and placed them in distinctive places across the country. All passers-by had to do was phone the number, read the script into the answering machine, and wait to hear themselves on the radio. An OOH campaign that doubled as an radio campaign.

The scripts changed depending on where they were located, making them contextually relevant so that they spoke to the mindset or moment the person was in. We knew this would make it that much more engaging for people taking part. Each script included our hero messages of Skinny’s low prices and great network, but everything else was completely crafted to make the most of the space it was in, whether that was on the side of a law firm office, strip club, coffee cup or beer coaster.

Once we put our scripts out into the world, we used a nationwide radio partnership to point people towards them. We had the radio ads playing on air, while hosts talked about the campaign and where to find scripts. It was like a nationwide treasure hunt, just without the treasure because no one was getting paid.

Every ad drove people to our Skinny answering machine where they could record their own script, and we knew which placement they’d seen based on the script they read. We needed as many regular voices as possible to give life to Skinny’s radio ads, providing a bank of radio ads to deploy to the nation as and when we needed.