Situation

The telecom brand Halebop truly believes in free speech – that everyone should have the opportunity to talk and be seen, and that we shouldn’t let those with power, money or followers claim all the space. This is something Halebop is working with long term under the name “Fria Samtal” (Free Calls/Conversations).

Brief

Create an engaging idea for “Fria Samtal”, with the regular phone call in focus. The target audience is typical, conscious 20-40 year old swedes, living in urban areas.

Objectives

The main goal of the campaign is to brand Halebop as a fighter for free, open conversation and for the common people's right to be heard.

Halebop made it possible to turn your everyday phone call into a pod called Bopcast. The content consisted 100% of real conversation by real, regular people. About whatever with whoever. All you needed to do was to enter Bopcast.se and write the number to the friend you wanted to have a phone call with. And then, Halebop released the call as part of an episode of the Bopcast podcast. Uploaded and ready on all of Swedens biggest media platforms.

The target audience is typical, conscious 20-40 year old swedes, living in urban areas. According to svenskarnaochinternet.se, they are the group that spend the most hours listening to podcasts (19% listens daily, around 50% listens at least a few times each month) (https://svenskarnaochinternet.se/rapporter/svenskarna-och-internet-2018/lyssna-over-halften-betalar-for-musik-pa-natet/16-35-aringar-lyssnar-mest-pa-podd/).

And while listening to podcasts is a big part of their lives, many of them also dream of becoming the podcaster – the one people listen to. By lowering the threshold and simplifying the “starting a Podcast bit” we gave all these friend groups a golden opportunity to flex their podcasting skills and become a podcast star (while also becoming a voice for the Halebop brand).

Campaign

The podcast, and the possibility to be the podcaster, was advertised via paid ads via OOH, OLV, Audio and other Podcasts. The general ads were live during most of the podcast’s run. As soon as calls and episodes started coming in, we used these to create additional paid and organic ads on SoMe, tagging those who took part in creating the podcast.

Tech

One key feature was the seamless interaction between our site and the phone service: calling, recording and then uploading without any input from the user (except putting in your phone number). Beyond that, we employed AI-driven tools to transcribe and analyze the recordings for quality assurance and to avoid offensive & disturbing content.

Production

The production (film, audio, tech) started early april, the campaign went live 1 of may. The last podcast episode went live on the 30th of june. Total budget media budget around 260k Euro.

72 million impressions, campaign total.

5,5 million reach, campaign total.

About 150 people participated and completed 40 recordings which we turned into 7 different episodes. Around 2700 people listened to the podcast.

After the campaign, 44% of the target audience responded that they think that Halebop takes social responsibility to a pretty big or even large extent. (According to a Nepa marketing survey)