The brief: 

Skinny. A New Zealand Telco who believes in low prices, and happy customers. A brand with a track record of saving customers' money through smart and thrifty advertising hacks. They want fame, but won’t waste their customers' money on frivolous things, like famous people in their ads. 

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

The idea: 

Celebrities charge millions of dollars to be in ads. Skinny doesn’t have millions of dollars. So, to bypass expensive voice talent and pricey recording studios, we launched ‘Phone it In’, a low-cost campaign that open-sourced radio scripts via out-of-home placements so Kiwis could record them on their mobile phones, for free.

The strategy: 

Growth for Skinny relies on finding ways to broaden their audience and engage new people. We can’t compete on spend - we don’t have big budgets, and we can’t afford expensive media.

Skinny’s motto is to do whatever it takes to keep prices low and customers happy. We needed a campaign that brought this to life, and reinforced our commitment to value for customers.

Historically, we’ve recruited faux-celebrities and customers for campaigns. But this time, we turned to everyday New Zealanders, customer or not. We offered literally anyone in the country an opportunity to participate in our campaign, and earn their moment of fame.

We turned up all over the place, inviting people to share the Skinny message.

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. Kiwis were convincing other Kiwis to ‘Get the Skinny’.

The execution:

Hundreds of Skinny radio scripts were published across the country. From standard placements like billboards and regional newspapers, to takeaway coffee cups, bar coasters, movie screens, early morning TV ad slots, social media, and a street poster blitz. Each script was written to be contextually relevant to its location, creating bespoke radio executions.

Above every script was a call-to-action that included a free-to-call-number that took callers to the automated ‘Skinny Radio Ad Recording Service’ (which is essentially an answering machine). From there, the recordings were given the trademark Skinny mnemonic and dispatched as radio ads.

The results: 

What we ended up with was a nation-wide out-of-home campaign that doubled as a radio campaign, and 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.

Skinny acquisitions went up 34% year-on-year, while in the same period, churn went down 26%.

65% of calls came from Skinny’s competitors’ customers.

Over three years of consistent brand building activity, we’d shifted Consideration from 35% in 2018 to 41% in 2021. Just 6% in four years. Phone It In shifted it another 6% shift… in just two months.