Brent Smart Wants Telstra Brand Platform to Make People ‘Feel Differently About Us’

Brent Smart believes Telstra's new brand platform will create an emotional connection with those looking to swap telcos, partly because the launch work delivers a subtler message: by caring about craft and creativity, the brand shows that it cares about customers too.

The chief marketing officer tells LBB he wants Telstra to become known for attention to detail and imagination, so the fresh platform, ‘Wherever we go’, had to be detailed and imaginative. It had to prove that “big brands need to do things that only big brands can do,” including investing in craft.

“It's one of those things that a customer will never articulate, but they will feel,” Brent says.

“We feel the brands that have taken the time to care for something, and it says a lot about how much the brand will therefore care about the experience and care about the product and, ultimately, care about the customer.

“In a market where a lot of things all look the same, and where a lot of marketers have all got the same playbook … craft can become a differentiator for us.”

The roll out had to showcase that craft at scale: almost 3,000 out of home sites; 40 special builds and painted murals, some featuring photographs of graphics created by layers of paper; over 300 unique versions of the out of home artworks “taking into account the different sizes and orientation, right down to lighting angle and shadows”; and an animated hero film.

The platform's brand building job is focused on potential customers. Brent notes the telco has done a lot of work to sharpen the product for existing customers – an improved customer experience and network are leading to “good NPS scores”, he says – but non-customers “can't evaluate the experience because they're not getting it.”

“So it's really important that we give them some other way to evaluate us," he says. “We feel like we can use our brand advertising as a way to really help them feel differently about us.”

‘Wherever we go’ launched today, ahead of this weekend’s AFL grand final – “there's no Super Bowl here in Australia, but it's the closest thing we've got” – but it’s been a year in the making. Brent asked his bespoke agency, +61, to start building it as soon as he appointed the model comprising TBWA, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, and OMD.

It was a mighty opening brief, and Brent praises +61 for giving him a “best of both worlds situation, where we can have the level of purity and obsession that you get from Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, with the level of scale and unrivalled resources that you get from OMD and TBWA.”

The choice to animate the platform’s hero film meant the brand didn’t have to “be constrained by the rules of the real world” and the journey “can be so much more epic.” In the spot, a boy is accompanied by a critter representing Telstra – sometimes a bird, sometimes a fish or a ghost or a cloud – to a forest and the desert, underground and underwater.

“We don't want to be a brand that just holds up a mirror to our target,” Brent explains. “A lot of brands show real people being real people telling real stories. We wanted to do something a bit more imaginative.”

Launching the platform with the animation “felt like a very natural choice for what we're trying to do strategically.”

“We don't want to be an animated brand, and we also don't want to be just a live action brand,” Brent says. “We want to be a brand that's about imagination and possibility.

“We want to find all different ways of expressing the brand. Now some brand experts will say that lacks consistency. But I think they look at consistency in a very narrow way, which is: everything has to look the same. I think we want everything to feel the same versus look the same.”

The ambitious OOH approach was a test for this philosophy. “It would have been really tempting to do some matching luggage. The imagery is so beautiful from the film, it would have been tempting just to pull that imagery into the out of home.

"But instead, we've gone for something we believe is really iconic, and again, really distinctive. It uses our brand colours in a really bold way, and we think it's just a really powerful way to introduce this new thought of 'Wherever we go'.”

More than 300 OOH assets were created “so that the paper craft was conscious of media placements”, and the takeover of almost 3,000 sites includes 40 hand painted murals and special builds.

Brent thinks the OOH’s “craft is next level”, and Bear Meets Eagle on Fire’s care for “every single detail” is unmatched - another of those can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it things that will seep into customers’ perception of the brand, he hopes.

“No one will be able to articulate it, but it just feels a bit special, and it feels really warm and human.”

Brent purposefully invested in OOH because, “in a world where it's never been easier to avoid, skip, opt out, block advertising, out of home is a truly unmissable medium.”

“You have to reduce everything down to its purest form to do great out of home,” he says. “Out of home is an incredible brand building medium. I think the challenge is most people use it incorrectly.”

The platform’s launch had to slot into the window between the Olympics – for which the brand's widely-loved stop motion series was created – and Christmas, or else wait until next year to roll out.

The Christmas campaign, designed to woo customers over the critical retail period, won’t be animated, Brent says. And despite ‘Wherever we go’ being the focus for just six weeks before the festive push begins, he is adamant the work is enduring.

“All this brand work's going to come back,” he assures. “So it's not like we're going to run it just now for six weeks and then on to the next thing. It'll all come back next year.

“It's certainly going to run for a long time, and same with the network critters. They'll come back too. We're building stuff that I think has a long shelf life. I think it's stuff that is on second, third, 10th watch, hopefully still interesting and not annoying. I'm trying to build brand stuff that's timeless.”