Small in Stature, Big in Personality: How Aunt Helga Helped IONOS Break the UK
With her famous catchphrase and striking demeanour, Aunt Helga burst onto UK screens in September 2021, breaking records for IONOS’ site traffic just two days later. Over the next year, the campaign - thought up by London-based creative agency 2050 - helped the brand more than double prompted awareness, supercharge UK market share, increase customer inflow and smash brand objectives.
In this interview, 2050 strategy director Ben Tan, client director Adam Morrison and creative directors Adam Chiappe and Saunby take us behind the scenes on how the German tech whizz came to life, becoming an instant hit and helping take the brand to new heights in the UK.
LBB> Tell us about how your relationship with IONOS began.
Ben> IONOS arrived, like Aunt Helga, out of the blue. IONOS approached one of our ‘ecosystem partners’ – a design agency called Nomad - and invited us to pitch with them. We are close to a number of agencies who share our ‘positively bonkers’ creative ethos and fame focus. It lets us partner quickly and effectively because we build on pre-existing, trusted relationships that work.
Adam M> The consortium brought together 2050’s award winning advertising expertise, Nomad’s brand design and The Armoury’s production capabilities. Getting tight with the team and production early meant that we were able to present work we knew was going to be epic while doable within the timings and budget. We could get off to a flyer once we had the client’s go ahead on the core idea.
LBB> What was the brief from the client and what was the problem you were tasked with solving?
Ben> At launch the brief was simple: crack the UK for SMEs. IONOS is Europe’s biggest web services provider. It’s really big. It rivals Go Daddy at the SME end of the market and Amazon Web Services at the multi-national end of the market. It’s huge in fact. Except in the UK. And a leading global player like IONOS needed to change that.
Saunby> Previous attempts at UK marketing had been a miserable failure. They’d put serious money into TV but ran German adapted ads, needless to say they didn’t work and they sank without a trace. They’d come to the painful realisation that the UK was different and that they didn’t understand it. What the Germans needed was some positively bonkers British thinking. This meant working with a UK agency that understood UK culture to create ideas to make IONOS famous to Brits.
LBB> At the brainstorming stage, what particular parts of their business stood out to you?
Ben> It was soon clear that when it came to SMEs – and we’re talking the small-end of the SME market – web services were a commodity market. Tech moves fast and any advantage becomes generic within months. IONOS had no standout qualities when it came to its offering. Embracing this fact simplified things. We had to stand for a tech attitude rather than a tech capability. And here our German provenance suddenly became relevant. When a Brit thinks ‘German’, they think ‘engineering excellence’, ‘technical quality’ and ‘professionalism’. Audi, Mercedes and BMW have been fantastic at building the ‘German’ brand. IONOS might not have anything different to offer, but you’d certainly believe they’d deliver it with Teutonic efficiency. This was our way into the active brand idea.
LBB> You were looking to differentiate IONOS’ brand position with a fame-building campaign. What was important to communicate in terms of IONOS’ identity? What is the story you wanted to tell in the UK market?
Adam C> This is a back-to-basics campaign. Keep it simple and make it memorable. Our customers are business owners who are ‘doing the website’ after hours in their own time. They know it is a simple task for someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s just that they don’t. It doesn’t take partnership and understanding to sort it out, an intelligent teenager could do it. It’s just that they can’t. This isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s more like when you see a doctor – you just want to get better fast. But they don’t know who to turn to because don’t know the players in the category. In their ‘hour of need’, the question is (as Ghostbusters put it): “Who ya gonna call?” And the challenge for IONOS is to be the brand who pops to mind in this moment.
Adam M> At 2050 we believe in active brand ideas. Be an agent of change. And for IONOs it was simple: the German tech whizz who sorts out your web problems. What makes this positively bonkers is the embodiment of the ‘German tech whizz’: Aunt Helga. A German character that not only conveys innate tech credibility, but she’s also an all business, no-nonsense, tough love, Teutonic efficiency. In contrast to competitors, who want to be the friend who grows your business. A salient, yet meaningful idea.
LBB> What options or ideas did the ideation process throw out?
Saunby> We knew right at the start of the ideation progress that some kind of brand character was right for IONOS. One idea we had was a technology viking, who was sat on a pile of old computer wires holding a staff with the IONOS logo on it. Aunt Helga defeated him though…!
LBB> Aunt Helga is a striking character. Positively bonkers, some might say. What and who was behind the creation of her very specific aesthetic and personality? What’s the reason for her tiny stature?
Chiappe> It felt all too obvious to have Aunt Helga as a younger character, the kind of gravitas, experience, and knowledge you get with age is something we loved. IONOS being a German brand we were also inspired by the no nonsense efficient approach of German people, mixed with the slightly eccentric fashion sense of people like Karl Lagerfield. For us it felt right to have her super small, almost cartoon-like, if she was big her sense of brash efficiency could come across as more threatening. All these ideas were collaboratively worked on by the team at 2050, our director Marc Sidelsky and our partners at Nomad.
LBB> The campaign featuring Aunt Helga broke IONOS records for site traffic on the first weekend. Tell us about the results and success of this campaign.
Ben> Yes, the campaign was an instant hit! We launched on a Friday 21st September 2021 and two days later we’d broken records for IONOS’ best-ever Sunday for site traffic.
More importantly though, prompted awareness more than doubled from 9% to 19% (Mar 21 - Mar 22) smashing the 10.8% objective for 2022 in the first quarter of that year.
IONOS tracks market share of online sales by looking at sales from the IONOS.co.uk website vs key competitors’ sales from their websites. We increased this measure by +3.8 percentage points (May 21 - Apr 22). This represents a huge jump from where they were.
The Aunt Helga TV ad is hardworking, but primarily conceived to brand the brand. And we can see the impact of a stronger brand on activation because average monthly new customer inflow from online performance marketing has increased an incredible +136.8% (Aug 21 to Aug 22).
Saunby> Culturally we were connecting too. Qual research showed the Aunt Helga character along with her catchphrases and distinctive personality had landed strongly with those who recalled the ad. So, there was substance behind the awareness.
In less than a year, Aunt Helga transformed IONOS fortunes: from a forgettable brand, buried deep within the chasing pack, to a memorable brand on a faster than expected trajectory to ultimately challenge for category leadership against GoDaddy. And within IONOS, the UK has gone from being seen as ‘problem child’ to ‘marketing leader’.
LBB> Throughout your work with IONOS, what have been some of the biggest challenges you have faced and what solutions did you come up with?
Ben> The biggest challenge was taking a rational German client on a journey to deliver positively bonkers creative. We were helped by the fact they recognised that what they’d done before didn’t work and they needed guidance to understand UK culture and move forward. So, they were open to new ideas. But it took a lot of work to prepare the ground and build the foundations of a trusting relationship to make this work.
Chiappe> Being a tech company, whose audience is made up of web professionals it means some of the things we need to talk about can sound over complex, having a straight-talking character helps with this but fitting messages in shorter time lengths can be especially challenging.
LBB> How have you continued to work with the brand since its successful UK launch campaign?
Ben> We have just completed a second Aunt Helga TVC which just launched in September with digital support. And we’re all very excited. The key evolution was to hero the tech more and position as a premium service.
LBB> Looking back over the whole project, what were the most personally interesting aspects of it for you?
Adam M> Seeing Aunt Helga evolve from an idea conceived in days to its positively bonkers final glory. And then in year two, watching Sam and Lara smash out digital banner templates for 150 + executions – you know.
Chiappe> Evolving characters over time is always an interesting thing to watch play out, seeing which parts of the campaign people outside of our industry remember. Having friends recite ‘nice, nice, nice’ or ‘I own this’ tells me the character is connecting with people and is memorable.
