Skinny is a New Zealand mobile company that’s committed to providing great value for their customers. We created ‘Phone it In’, an outdoor campaign that doubled as a radio campaign by inviting Kiwis to record radio ads on their mobiles – for free.

Dozens of highly contextual, location-specific scripts were spread across the country as OOH, referencing everything from the German cars of an affluent suburb to the dimly-lit carparks of a dodgy part of town.

In this execution, a script was placed on the front page of a newspaper.

It included a phone number for the public to call and record the script into an answering machine.

The person recording the ad became a free spokesperson for Skinny’s mission to do anything to keep prices low.

To keep prices low, Skinny has printed this radio script on the front page of a newspaper in the hope that someone like me will call the number provided and record it for free, saving Skinny thousands on recording costs.

Yep, a newspaper ad doubling as a radio ad, tripling as a low-cost way to tell the nation about Skinny’s incredible mobile network. They might not be paying me a cent, but who cares, because I’m on the radio. Hi mum! Get the Skinny!

Skinny is a New Zealand mobile company with a track record of saving customers money through smart and thrifty advertising hacks. We understand that when Skinny spends big money on advertising, it’s their customers that ultimately pay the price.

The brief was to create a campaign that furthered Skinny’s mission to keep prices low while making the product (mobiles) integral to the idea.

So we launched ‘Phone it In’, a low-cost, interactive campaign that let Kiwis record Skinny radio ads on their mobile phones (for free), removing the need for expensive voice talent and pricey recording studios.

What we ended up with was a nation-wide out-of-home campaign that doubled as a radio campaign that became Skinny’s most effective recruitment campaign ever.

2,560 radio ads were recorded by ordinary New Zealanders, equating to 22 hours of content that didn’t cost us a cent to record.

65% of calls came from Skinny’s competitors’ customers. This was an important result because growth for Skinny relies on finding ways to broaden their audience and engage new people.

We saw Skinny acquisitions go up 34%, while in the same period, churn went down 26%.

In an era where user-generated content for brands feels dated, we turned up with a real-world user-generated content campaign, and it worked.

Our overall budget was $310,000 USD.

Our media budget for the campaign was $224k. We spent just $40k on OOH, a small price to pay considering those OOH sites led to the creation of over 2,500 unique radio ads. The majority of the media budget went towards broadcasting those UGC radio ads to the nation.

The remaining non-media budget went towards production and agency fees.

We acquired 16,811 incremental new customers compared to the same time last year. Those new customers were worth $8.28M. Phone It In delivered an ROI of $25 for every dollar spent, and was Skinny's most effective low cost recruitment campaign ever.

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