CHI & Partners Focuses on Family Life in New TalkTalk Campaign

TalkTalk will this evening launch a new brand campaign, ‘This Stuff Matters’, offering a candid glimpse into how modern families live their lives today – and the central roles technology and connectivity have come to play within the family unit.

 

Created by CHI&Partners, ‘This Stuff Matters’ represents a turning point for TalkTalk as well as a departure from previous advertising within the telecoms category. It was created by installing unmanned cameras in a real family home, filming non-stop for two weeks in order to capture authentic, unscripted footage of the life of one British family.

 

Breaking on TV and spanning video-on-demand, cinema, press, out-of-home, reactive content and PR, the multichannel campaign features a real family of TalkTalk customers: a mum and dad, Julie and Paul; two sons and two daughters, Peter, Harry, Sophie and Lucy; a niece, Daisy; and the family dog, Elvis.

 

The campaign is woven together in a series of ten films, with a strapline “X. It matters” – for example “Telly after a hard day’s work. It matters” or “Boys. They matter”. The films spotlight all the little moments in life that matter and the role TalkTalk’s products and services play in them, from navigating TV dinners with a dog on the sofa, to texting boyfriends, to teaching Auntie Julie how to use her tablet.

 

‘This Stuff Matters’ was created by CHI&Partners’ Danny Hunt, Dan Watts and Rob Webster, and directed by Park Pictures’ Tom Tagholm – the talent behind Channel 4’s 2012 Paralympics campaign ‘Meet the Superhumans’. The casting process alone took a mammoth three months, followed by a creative process which involved going through hundreds of hours’ worth of footage to find all the moments that make up the fabric of family life, with all its ups and downs.

 

The campaign marks a significant shift for TalkTalk and forms part of a number of major changes TalkTalk is making to further put customers at the heart of its business and return to its challenger roots.  In addition to the conscious move away from the increasingly promotional and celebrity-driven marketing in this category, TalkTalk will also become the only major internet provider to:

 

- Reward existing customers’ loyalty by giving them the same best-value deals previously only available to new customers. Any customer who has had a TalkTalk package for three months or more can switch and save money if there is a better TalkTalk deal available;

 

- Offer customers the security of fixing their price for 18 months, guaranteeing no broadband price rises;

- Scrap separate line rental charges on all packages, and move to a single combined monthly price. TalkTalk has been a long-term advocate of simpler, more transparent ‘all-in’ pricing, and in May 2016 was the first provider to announce its decision to move to ‘all in’.

 

TalkTalk’s focus on existing customers has already led to higher levels of trust, the lowest level of complaints in its history and more customers choosing to stay with TalkTalk than ever before.

 

Tristia Harrison, Managing Director for Consumer at TalkTalk, said:

“TalkTalk is changing. Nothing matters more to us than our customers and doing right by them is the right thing for our business. We’ve listened hard to what they’ve told us and we’re acting on it. People are fed up of confusing packages and loud advertising, they’re frustrated with deals which shoot up mid contract, and they hate seeing the best deals saved for new customers.

 

TalkTalk entered the market as a challenger, and we’ve always saved customers money. But today’s changes are about more than that. We know this is an essential service that really matters to people, so it needs to be simple, affordable, reliable and fair. We’re proud to be the first to make the big changes customers expect and deserve of their telecoms provider today.”

 

Micky Tudor, Creative Partner at CHI&Partners, said: “This is a very brave, completely unprecedented campaign, which proves that the small, humble moments of everyday life have as much power to capture our imaginations and move us as do the big, glossy, aspirational scenes of traditional advertising. We’re incredibly proud of it, and we feel we’ve stumbled across some truths about family life today that no other brand has yet touched on. We hope the people of Britain love it as much as we do.” 

 

The campaign will roll out nationwide, breaking this week with one 60” spot, with nine more 30” and 20” spots appearing from the 10th of October. Media planning and buying was delivered by m/SIX.

 

Print and out-of-home executions will feature photography from Olly Burn – the photographer for CHI&Partners’ Lexus Hoverboard campaign – who joined the family for two weekends in order to capture moments from their day-to-day lives in stills.