Skinny. A telco who believes in low prices, and happy customers, and have consistently delivered on that strategy for years.

Skinny want fame, but won’t waste their customers' money on frivolous things, like famous people in their ads. This strategy enables them to keep prices low (and customers happy).

So in 2022, we open-sourced their brand campaign to the public.

The entire country could record Skinny’s new campaign on their mobile...for free.

A guerrilla OOH campaign, that evolved into a radio campaign, that delivered a 34% increase in new customers yoy. A perfect marriage of strategy and creative.

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 Zealnders who share names with A-list celebrities. We’ve also turned our customers into 'Friend-vertisers'.

But what would the next iteration be?

Success would be measured against two key sets of objectives.

1. Growth

Between 2019 and 2021, we grew the base on average by 12% each year. Our objective for this campaign was to see growth greater than 12%.

2. Consideration

Consideration is Skinny’s key brand metric to move. In 2019, 2020 and 2021, this increased by an average of 2% each year. Our objective was to shift this +2% in 2022.

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 3 major competitors, and has proved stubborn to shift.

CHALLENGE:

In a recessionary environment, and with growth stagnating, Skinny needed a new execution of our brand philosophy that wouldn’t cost the earth to produce, and would bring people into our fold by demonstrating our brand promise.

Throughout its growth trajectory, Skinny has stuck hard to the attitudes and values that made it beloved by so many New Zealanders; that we do whatever it takes to keep prices low and customers happy.

It's proof that you can have your cake and eat it too - you can have low prices, without sacrificing everything else. Skinny work smarter, not harder, to deliver just that.

With stagnating growth, and a parent company cracking the whip, we went back to the heart of our creative strategy to figure out a way to show New Zealanders, in a new way, that they could outsmart the category with Skinny.

Happy customers are a core part of our brand promise.

And boy, are our customers happy.

We might not have the spend or the stature of the other brands, but when we look hard into our brand tracking research, we see that we've got the highest NPS (net promoter score) of any telco in the country.

Skinny customers are actually more than just customers, they’re Skinny fans. Our customers are more likely to recommend us to their friends and families than any other provider in the market.

That is powerful. And while we'd weaponised this fandom for customers in previous campaigns, we wondered if we could take it one step further.

Our first campaign was to pay faux-lebrities to front our campaign.

The second was to pay our own customers.

But in this third iteration?

We'd ask the general public to get on board.

Enter...'Phone It In'

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

Unique radio scripts on OOH posters, placed in distinctive places across the country. People rang 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.

Each script was crafted to make the most of the space it was in, whether that was on the side of an office, strip club, coffee cup or beer coaster.

And hundreds of messages rolled in, creating a bank of radio ads and some sort-of-famous fans.

Yet, nobody got paid. Relying on the fandom of our customers (and the nation) paid off – people were willing to promote Skinny for free! Years of investment into our brand had built something people truly loved, and recommended.

This has been the single most successful recruitment campaign Skinny has ever run.

1. Campaign Engagement: did people call?

We thought we’d be lucky to get 1,000 recorded radio scripts.

And yet, we received over 2,500 recordings. A whopping 40% came from people who weren’t even our customers.

2. Brand Consideration

Over the previous 3 years, we’d shifted consideration just 6%.

Phone it in shifted it another 6%... in just two months.

This shift was the largest we’ve seen since we started tracking this metric back in 2018.

3. Customer Growth

Other than this campaign, we were running identical seasonal promotions to the previous year, with similar price points, and no changes in distribution.

But thanks to Phone It In, Skinny acquired more than 16,000 customers MORE during the campaign period than previous years.

These customers are worth $13.02M to Skinny.

Delivering an ROI of $25.29 for every dollar spent.

With a brand promise of keeping prices low, Skinny do not indulge in many of the marketing behaviours enjoyed by our competitors.

We do not have sponsorships, like Spark Arena, the largest stadium in the country.

We do not offer value-adds, like Netflix or Spotify, like all three of our major competitors do.

We are, by design, last-to-market with almost every brand or product innovation, thanks to being the low-cost brand in the stable, and allowing Spark to be first. So yes, we delivered new products to market during this time, but only after everyone else had already launched.

We have an always-on search and digital retail layer, but this has run consistently prior to the campaign without a significant change in budget.

Our campaign was the only thing that changed. It’s what drove this phenomenal growth for Skinny.

Please see confidential section.