Skinny is a New Zealand mobile company that’s committed to providing great value for their customers. We created ‘Phone it In’, an outdoor campaign that doubled as a radio campaign by inviting Kiwis to record radio ads on their mobiles – for free.

Dozens of highly contextual, location-specific scripts were spread across the country as OOH, referencing everything from the German cars of an affluent suburb to the dimly-lit carparks of a dodgy part of town.

In this execution, a script was placed outside a lawyer.

It included a phone number for the public to call and record the script into an answering machine.

The person recording the ad became a free spokesperson for Skinny’s mission to do anything to keep prices low.

Lawyer 30”

To keep prices low, Skinny has printed this radio script on a wall near a law firm in the hope that a lawyer like me might call the number provided and record it on their mobile for free, thus saving Skinny thousands in recording costs.

They get this ad read for free, and in exchange I get a moment of fame, which now that I say it out loud doesn’t seem like adequate compensation for total and unvetted proprietary rights of my voice. But who cares, ‘cause I’m on the radio! Hi mum! Get the Skinny!

Skinny is a New Zealand mobile company with a track record of saving customers money through smart and thrifty advertising hacks. We understand that when Skinny spends big money on advertising, it’s their customers that ultimately pay the price.

The brief was to create a campaign that furthered Skinny’s mission to keep prices low while making the product (mobiles) integral to the idea.

So we launched ‘Phone it In’, a low-cost, interactive campaign that let Kiwis record Skinny radio ads on their mobile phones (for free), removing the need for expensive voice talent and pricey recording studios.

What we ended up with was a nation-wide out-of-home campaign that doubled as a radio campaign that became Skinny’s most effective recruitment campaign ever.

2,560 radio ads were recorded by ordinary New Zealanders, equating to 22 hours of content that didn’t cost us a cent to record.

65% of calls came from Skinny’s competitors’ customers. This was an important result because growth for Skinny relies on finding ways to broaden their audience and engage new people.

We saw Skinny acquisitions go up 34%, while in the same period, churn went down 26%.

In an era where user-generated content for brands feels dated, we turned up with a real-world user-generated content campaign, and it worked.

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