“Telstra-bashing” is a national pastime that countless Australians have participated in from our pubs to talkback radio. The negativity surrounding the brand can often become disproportionately loud, drowning out the good it does. And Telstra does a lot of good, from closing the digital literacy gap to providing free entry to Australia’s art galleries for all Australians.

As a result of this, Telstra’s two major competitors were leading in reputation and citizenship scores. This meant they led us on perceptions of being a “positive influence on society” and “supporting good causes”.

To address this, we needed remind Australians of everything Telstra does to fulfil its purpose – ‘Building a connected future so everyone can thrive’. And in doing so re-frame the narrative around Telstra, giving Australians and staff a reason to be proud in their national telco.

The key objectives were to shift brand affinity, brand reputation and staff NPS.

Telstra is the incumbent market leader with the most to lose from the newfound customer freedom and choice that the decoupling of plans and devices, and no lock in contracts have heralded in. In the old days, it might’ve meant focusing completely on customer retention, but in this new market paradigm we realized that it wasn’t enough just to try to “keep” existing customers, we had to win their preference afresh month in, month out. So we set ourselves the more ambitious focus on winning over and building affinity with non-customers.

If we could persuade them to switch to Telstra, our customers would be persuaded to stay as well.

Following the PR led payphone brand act, a mass market campaign was launched. The media approach was designed for stature, presence, and mass awareness.

The campaign was kicked-off by statement large format OOH across a number of iconic billboards nationally.

The OOH was quickly followed by 60” TV spots, run during the Olympics. Our closest rival, Optus, had spent big on the Olympics as the second largest broadcast sponsor. We had a choice to either launch after the Olympics (and let Optus have the moment) or to embrace it, co-opting significant media around their sponsorship deal. With such a big, patriotic idea, we knew the Olympics was the right back drop to launch and would give us the best chance to steal Optus’s thunder.

The campaign idea was quickly substantiated across all channels, with powerful proof points demonstrating how Telstra puts Australia first, from sustainability to sponsorship and network.

‘Australia is why’ is the most successful brand campaign in Telstra’s history.

Since they were made free, 5.8 million calls have been made on a payphone, a 160% increase in calls that Australians were able to make in their time of need.

Gen Z Brand Consideration increased 4pts from previous quarter and Small Business 6pts.

4% increase in brand affinity (“a brand for someone like me”) from pre-campaign average - in only one quarter we were able to shift the hearts of nearly 400,000 Australian adults.

Telstra jumped-up 7 spots in the RepTrak rankings of Australia’s top 100 companies in only one quarter

Over the course of the campaign Telstra saw 1.1 million incremental customers delivered from marketing activity. These led to a $925.6M incremental revenue, and a ROMI of $19.70 per $1 spent.

Finally, we saw 13-point increase in staff NPS across all 26,000 employees.