Via coding and some partnerships with online media-outlets, we managed to hack the actual buffering wheel and turned it into a new advertising medium, to directly confront our target audience with our core message ‘Load up to 2 times faster with VOO.’ while they were experiencing the problem. So rather than flatly telling we gave consumers the right experience at exactly the right time. To drive conversion all of them got also retargeted with a commercial offer.

VOO Telecom is Belgium’s biggest Telecom Challenger. Since the internet has become so much part of our daily life, one of the main battlefields in Telco business and reasons to switch provider is the speed of the internet. VOO Telecom has invested a huge amount of money in modern technology and because of they were able to offer their clients an internet speed that on average can be up to 2 times faster than their biggest competitor, the Telecom market leader. The kpi was very clear: gain market share in the internet market. But apart from share of market, VOO telecom wanted an idea that would also grow their share of heart and clearly position them as THE TelCo challenger in Belgium.

Over 50% of people experience ‘Buffer Rage’ every day, a state of uncontrollable anger, induced by the interruption of online content or streaming video. We all know how it feels to stare at this ever-turning buffering wheel. To promote the fact that VOO telecom has Belgium’s fastest internet, we decided to hijack that symbol of rage and frustration: the actual buffering wheel. So, for the first time ever, whenever somebody is uploading or streaming video and a buffering wheel appears, the VOO message appears too: Load up to 2 times faster with VOO. To do so we wrote some code, set up a collaboration with Belgium’s biggest media partners and added our line of code to the code of their buffering wheel. By doing so we made sure that every time somebody was confronted with the problem, they were also confronted with the solution.

Our target audience was very specific: any client of our biggest competitor, the market leader. The reason obviously being that we know that the internet speed of VOO is up to 2 times faster than the internet speed of their biggest competitor. But instead of flatly telling our target audience that VOO internet is way faster, we wanted to confront them with the solution while they were experiencing the problem. We could not specifically target non-clients, but to make sure that VOO clients were not confronted with the ‘faster internet’-message, we made sure that our message only appeared after 1.5 seconds of buffering. Reason being that via data we know that on average VOO clients never have to wait more than 1.5 seconds when buffering. So this way we were 95% sure that only non-VOO clients would be confronted with our message ‘Load up to 2 times faster with VOO.’

End of October ’18 the ‘buffer rage’ campaign was live. Which means that we delivered the code to hack the buffering wheel to 4 of Belgium’s biggest news-outlets and streaming services. Via a partnership with those 4, our message ‘Load up to 2 times faster with VOO’ reached 70% of our target audience at the exact moment they were getting frustrated by the slow internet speed of our biggest competitor. This message was displayed over 2.5 million times in the first 5 days. To drive conversion all of them got also retargeted with a commercial offer.

A new advertising medium created, a clear first. Over 2.5 million messages displayed in the first 5 days. Over 70% of main target audience reached at the exact moment they were being frustrated by the internet speed of VOO’s main competitor. To drive conversion all of them got retargeted. All this leading to an astonishing +20% in sales of VOO’s fast internet product compared to sales in the month before the ‘buffer rage’-stunt.