The DR is a country with a population of 10,000,000 with more than 1,500,000 Dominicans living abroad. 95% of them in the USA. The high cost of long distance calls has kept families from talking to each other more often. Tricom decided to change their long distance calls and match the price of a local one: 95 cents. The client suggested the use of flyers to be given out as a communications tool to keep it within the USD$5,000 budget. We thought it wasn’t right to communicate such a big benefit in a medium so easily disposable.

We took more than 150 thousand (~$4,500 USD) 1 peso coins and on one side put a sticker that read: “Start calling for less than this to the USA”. We negotiated with different establishments and a major retail store that moved around 50 thousand people a day to put them and have them mixed with other coins and given out randomly as loose change to customers at the registers. The advertising not only reached its target audience but moved around it as consumers kept paying with the coins.

The good thing about this is that the message and its medium never died, it kept spreading virally from hand to hand, from one place to another. Newspapers and radio shows spoke about the way a telephone company narrowed the distance between loved ones abroad, generating free press. Tricom had a 58% increase in Residential Lines on its first month, compared to a 13% the year before. By the end of the year Residential Lines had grown 260% Even though its launch was in the capital city it has been found in other cities and towns throughout the country.