Audio & Radio > Innovation in Radio & Audio
COLENSO BBDO, Auckland / SKINNY / 2023
Awards:
Overview
Credits
Write a short summary of what happens in the radio or audio work.
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.
Each script 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.
Translation. Provide a full English translation of any audio.
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!
Background:
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.
Describe the Impact:
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.
Please outline the innovative elements of the work
We turned an OOH campaign into a radio campaign that didn’t cost a cent to record. Since Skinny’s ad budget would have gone towards the same outdoor media space anyway, this innovative two-for-one campaign made financial sense and stayed true to Skinny’s ethos.
To achieve this, we open-sourced 34 bespoke radio scripts via OOH placements so anybody could record them on their mobiles for free, removing the need for pricey celebrity voices and recording studios.
Hundreds of scripts were published across the country. Each was written to be contextually relevant to its location, creating thousands of unique radio executions performed by Kiwis.
Above every script was a free-to-call-number that took callers to the automated ‘Skinny Radio Ad Recording Service’ (an answering machine). From there, the recordings were dispatched as radio ads.
In an era where user-generated content for brands feels dated, we turned up with a real-world user-generated content campaign.
Is there any cultural context that would help the jury understand how this work was perceived by people in the country where it ran?
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