Challenge:Supplement the company’s strong efforts to acquire new customers with a creative way to keep existing customers and deepen their loyalty to the brand. Do it in a way that penetrates pop culture and generates buzz and cultural currency around the brand.

Idea:Create a memorable, quotable set of characters that embody the DIRECTV credo of “most premium at a great value.” Make their world so entertaining and seemingly real that the public wants to believe and play along with the joke.

DIRECTV entered 2010/2011 with two goals: improve the business they received from existing customers, and field advertising that will make a big splash in popular culture and cultivate mass awareness around the brand. Using the same creative theme, they had one solution for television that drove new subscriber acquisitions (The Oligarch), and one digital solution that garnered brand affinity and loyalty by entertaining and charming the public (Petite Lap Giraffe).

Results: The campaigns delivered strongly across all success measures.

Breakthrough/Buzz Worthy: Both TV and Digital iterations of the Oligarch / PetiteLapGiraffe campaign created enormous buzz around the creative and the brand.

Mass Awareness: The Oligarch TV campaign sparked a pop-cultural embrace that included millions of YouTube views, countless user parodies, and references by celebrities and TV personalities. The PetiteLapGiraffe.com site garnered over 10 million site visits, with the ensuing digital PR campaign garnering an additional 45MM media impressions in over 200 countries and territories.

Cultural Currency: The PetiteLapGiraffe website was met with an eager public, willing to spend long amounts of time with the brand and the entertaining content it created. Users shared the story and the site at an incredible rate, wanting to spread the joy and be the one in the know.

Higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): The combined effect of the two parts of the campaign helped DIRECTV continuously increase their all-important ARPU number in the time since the campaign launched.

DIRECTV went beyond print and created the ultimate swimsuit model experience. Ads were placed throughout the magazine that led readers to download a free “Swimsuit Viewer” app.Readers launched the app and held their smartphones or tablets over the swimsuit models. Using image recognition technology, the images on the page literally came to life from the moment they were photographed for the printed issue. Every model had their own interactive video that was tagged with a message from the DIRECTV spokeswoman, Kate Upton, who was also the covermodel. The content and the advertising came together to make a better experience for any reader.

The ‘Cable Effects’ delivered a great success for DIRECTV in 2 ways: it gave the brand huge pop-cultural relevance and also lured cable subscribers onto DIRECTV’s platform in droves. The public response was tremendous: Almost 1.5MM views on YouTube, tens of thousands of tweets, and stories published in many major entertainment and media outlets. The business results were even stronger: The ‘Cable Effects’ campaign drove the mass exodus from cable DIRECTV had hoped for: the company experienced a 5% year-over-year lift in new customers coming from cable, and a 12% lift versus the quarter directly before the commercials aired.