EE Reveals Its Climactic Big Play in the Battle for Share of Life
Forget share of market, EE is aiming to grow its share of your life. The UK telecomms giant has just launched a new proposition that builds on its success in the mobile and broadband space and, the team hopes, turns it into a one-stop platform for your connected life.
The new business vision puts EE at the heart of our digital lives, whether we’re chilling in front of the TV, working from home, gaming or studying. It sees EE launch a completely new creative platform as well as a host of new products and tools. There’s the EE TV set top box, for example, and an expanded gaming store that will allow gamers to purchase not just consoles but in-game currencies. Tying it all together is the EE ID, a verified digital ID that will allow people to manage all of their devices, connections and subscriptions in one place. EE’s also opening up its products to those who don’t have a mobile contract with them.
It is, reflects Pete Jeavons, 12 years almost to the day that the EE brand launched as the newest player in the UK’s booming mobile telecomms space, a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and France's Orange. Since then, Pete and EE have been on an incredible journey together. In 2015 it was acquired by UK establishment mainstay British Telecomms (BT) and in 2022, he and the team announced that they’d flip the whole business on its head by replacing BT with EE as the flagship consumer brand. Now, after a journey that has seen the team pull apart all of its brand platform as well as its systems, tech stack and processes, EE is ready to lay out the full scope of its ambitions.
The scale of the challenge, says Pete, was no joke. “The complexity of that challenge meant that things took probably a little bit longer than we were expecting them to take. And so from our perspective, there were a lot of stop-starts and some gos and no-gos. And so it was really, really hard. It was hard to motivate yourself, hard to motivate the team, especially hard to motivate agencies that you're working in partnership with. I think it's actually brought everyone incredibly close together,” says Pete, reflecting that that closeness is why there are so many people from EE’s partner agencies at the launch.
It’s been a major undertaking for all of EE’s partners, especially the cross-agency team from Publicis Groupe that has dug deep to demonstrate what its ‘power of one’ slogan is all about. Talent from Saatchi & Saatchi, Digitas, Boomerang, Publicis•Poke, Zag and Prodigious have worked together to create not just the multichannel comms campaign, but to create everything from innovative digital tools to brand identity, social, retail stores, product and services positioning, and production into this campaign. The addressable-first media, audience planning and buying was led by longstanding media partner EssenceMediacom X, sponsorship and activation by Havas Play and PR by M&C Saatchi Talk and The Academy.
Indeed, what makes this project particularly exciting from a creative point of view is, says Saatchi & Saatchi chief strategy officer Richard Huntington, is that it’s been a business transformation driven by brand. Building off a vision devised by CEO Marc Allera, it’s taken the collective imagination of the Groupe to really figure out what role EE could play in our lives over the next decade. That, in turn, has informed everything from tech priorities, UX design to content strategies and everything in between.
“Fundamentally, I think we see this as a brand-led business transformation. We've had an era of digital business transformation. Now, UX is at parity across every provider, so the place to find growth is to make it brand-led. In a lot of ways, it was setting out a vision for our brand and then being patient because the business has got to build the infrastructure behind that,” says Richard.
“It's exciting for the creative industries because we've stopped dressing up the things that clients and businesses give us and started building the vision for that business today,” he says. “And I fundamentally believe only people from our sector have the imagination, to kind of go, ‘this is what your business could be’.”
Part of that vision was to figure out how EE could transcend the category of mobile telecomms to become something that could grow into new areas. Matt Holt is CSO at Digitas UK, which has been instrumental in creating the digital tools for this new EE, and he says the tech sector has been a massive inspiration.
“I think we've always had in our minds how we reframe a telco to a tech co - that's certainly been one of the things that we've been grasping with,” he says. “But the things that tech companies do really well is they put the customer at the heart. And we've used so many out-of-category examples of others basically creating platform businesses, essentially building around the customer.”
In order to put the customer truly at the centre of the business - and to futureproof the platform - the team has focused on verticals it’s calling ‘needs’. The first three ‘needs’ to launch are Home, Game, and Learn. Early next year, we’ll see the fourth need - Work - which will focus on the connection-heavy requirements for the Work From Home (WFH) mob. But, explains Pete, the new brand platform has flexibility built in. Just as WFH is a need that only really emerged during covid-19 lockdowns, the team foresees that new needs will likely crop up over time.
“What's driven all the work is the needs that we've identified,” says Pete. “In truth, we spent ages looking at those. What are the most important things in people's lives that we can focus on? We picked those four, but there could have been 10, 15, 20…” He continues, “The four are absolutely 100% right for now. Will they be the same in two years time? No, they won't. But by focusing and doubling down on those needs, and showing how our products and services can address them, does that have longevity and consistency? Absolutely. 100%. Although it might not be those four needs [in the future], the approach will still be exactly the same.”
Creative has been a huge part of communicating to people across Britain that EE understands these needs. That means a new creative campaign that’s a departure from the highly successful Kevin Bacon-fronted ads. While Kevin was full of Hollywood swagger and charisma, the new approach is all about creating snapshots of real life. The campaigns, directed by Love Song's Daniel Wolfe and Elliot Power, are streetcast and shot all around the UK, in London, Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle.
Pete says that moving on from their highly recognisable spokesperson was a huge conversation - but that the new approach uses recognition in a different way. In terms of the hero films, each zeroes in on a recognisable moment of life, whether it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon or a hectic bedtime routine for a busy family. That recognition is underlined with a recognisable track, like Faithless banger ‘Insomnia’ (for bedtime, of course), ‘It’s Not Over Yet’ by The Klaxons and ‘So We Are Here’ by Bloc Party.
But this new marketing strategy isn’t just about the top-level mass marketing. The team is now leaning into addressable in a big way. There’s so much on offer from the new EE that targeting each audience and sub-group with the relevant information was crucial.
“If you change your approach, which we have absolutely done, and go to relevance and addressability, then actually, you're sort of talking to different people about different things in slightly different ways, which allows you to get all of that across,” says Pete. “There are some things that you want everyone to overhear, like ‘EE's different, it's doing different things’. But then when you get into the specifics and the details of it, a gaming audience is very different to parents, who are very different to people who work from home, and vice versa. So if you come at it from an addressability relevance perspective, it can all live together. But we have to figure all that out because our approach prior to this was a single, binary message that we popped out to the world through very, very traditional channels.”
All of this means there’s also a far bigger demand on production. Saatchi & Saatchi’s chief production officer, Jess Ringshall, says that this meant a more strategic and integrated approach to production and content. From her perspective, it’s not just about creating ‘more stuff’, but creating more thoughtfully and really working closely with the media agency to test and analyse the content that’s working - meaning more effectiveness. “The really exciting thing for me is that suddenly, when brands talk about ‘we need to make more content but with the same budget’, we're able to work really forensically with them against that, constantly testing, learning what works and doesn’t work in the different channels,” she says. Given the integrated nature of the brief and the long time frame of the brand and business transformation, production has been able to work in a proactive and informed manner.
Now, as the new offering launches, the brand is entering into new spaces and the team behind it will have much to learn from its new competition. Not only is it up against the mobile and broadband businesses like Three or Virgin or Sky, it’s up against games retailers like Game or Argos or lifestyle brands like John Lewis. Pete says that it’s a real learning curve, particularly when it comes to how search or PPC works in those other categories. However, he’s full of excitement for this next phase of his journey with EE.
And for Richard Huntington, this kind of category-transcendence is a crucial part of the race for the future.
“There's a phrase, which is: ‘moving from share of market to share of life’,” he says. “EE's asking to serve a bigger share of your life than it has done before because it's not fighting for market share in broadband or mobile. One of the challenging things is, as more businesses realise that this is the only way to get real growth, everybody's going to want to have share of home security, share of insurance. Who's going to own charging your EV? Is it going to be your insurance company? Your car company? Your utility company? And that's what I mean by saying it has to be brand-led.”
“It's going to be the brand that's most credible doing it that will win.”
