In Australia, branded entertainment is still in its infancy as more traditional, interruptive forms of marketing still prevail.

A majority of brands usually just re-purpose TV commercials and publish them in the social media sphere, however brands are starting to become more aware of the power of authentic story telling in the digital space meaning there are more and more opportunities arising to create effective branded content for brands.

Telecommunications in Australia is a heavily regulated industry and suffers from issues grounded in poor service. The country has a specific Industry Ombudsman – the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) - to deal with complaints and issues customers encounter with their provider.

Advertising from telco providers is regularly scrutinised as major players battle to win hearts, minds and customer contracts.

With only three major players in Australia -Telstra, Optus and Vodafone – and with market shares generally not fluctuating between them, advertising and marketing budgets are spent promoting major device launches or on product and service related campaign executions in a bid to increase customer bases.

Wrapped around a simple idea: to deliver something that was as entertaining as Netflix itself, we launched the content using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

By allowing Ricky Gervais the sort of freedom that is counter to the way most advertising is created, we delivered something Australian consumers had never seen before. This encouraged sharing, tagging and commenting across social media.

By trusting in our audience’s ability to get the joke, we took a bold and ironic approach that we believed would resonate with them and that would drive social interaction, and conversation whilst delivering the key brand message.

Content went live on 24th March 2015.

Following results are taken from the first twelve days of campaign (results are ‘and counting’).

Facebook:

• 4,008,790. Australian views (from a population of 23 million).

• Anti-ad broke the record for the fastest branded video to 4M views in Australian Facebook’s history.

• Optus received a database of over 4,000,000 leads. Over 1,000,000 new leads generated in the first 24 hours.

• 1 in 3 of all Australian users viewed

YouTube:

• Unique Reach – 5,700,000

• Average Watch Time - 51 seconds (of 58 seconds).

• Total watch time – So far the campaign has clocked up 1.83M minutes or 3.5 years of watch time

• Content viewed in 143 countries

Twitter:

97% positive sentiment globally

PR:

• PR coverage reached over 4,600,000

• 52 pieces generated in Australia.

• Content featured on Ellen.

• 92% of coverage featured video

• Media ROI was 65:1

Brand Lift (from Optus study):

• 60% relative lift in Recall.

• 165% lift in Searches for Optus.

• 255% lift in Searches for Optus & Netflix.

• 1,070% lift in Searches for Ricky Gervais Netflix (previous Optus study: inconclusive)