The Campaign

ONE BIG GIG. We partnered with famed U.S. entertainer and improvising beat boxer, Reggie Watts, to undertake a 21-hour musical ‘road trip’ down-under, giving a shout-out to some of Australia’s weirdest and most wonderful towns, suburbs and cities. We’d worked out that 1GB of data equalled 21 hours of music on Guvera, so Reggie rapped, riffed and beatboxed his way through Australia, creating one of the worlds longest music tracks and showing Australians just how much music one GIG-abyte of data could get them – 21 hours of it!

Creative Execution

We launched the campaign with a 2-minute video with Reggie, teasing the track’s release. We also created filmed 30” and 15” content pieces with Reggie to drive the 1GB data offer even harder. For the track Reggie and his music producer turned the hundreds upon hundreds of town names into specific sound clips and then created multiple tracks with different effects for each one, which they layered and randomised. So no looping. And not a single hour where you hear the same thing twice. We conducted consumer research into how ‘Datafraid’ Aussies were and used the teaser video as an asset for PR to drive momentum before the track launch. We then brought Reggie to Australia to launch the track via a press tour. He riffed with some of Australia’s biggest entertainment journalists, driving the ONE B1G GIG message in a relevant and entertaining way.

The campaign content featuring Reggie generated over 3.2 million views across the campaign period. The supporting earned media campaign generated over 9.8 million opportunities to see the brand message, with a value of almost $1.2million, leading to an earned media campaign return on investment of over 4:1. Virgin Mobile’s customer acquisition target was smashed by 100% after just four months and total churn across the customer base (pre-paid and post-paid) reduced by 30% after three months. And, most importantly, Virgin Mobile delivered on their promise to ‘Make Mobile Better’ by delivering almost 1.5 million minutes of free music to some very happy customers. In fact, the campaign was deemed such a business success by Virgin Mobile, they decided to extend the campaign offer by another six months.

Virgin Mobile Australia tasked us with amplifying a new partnership they had formed with global music streaming service, Guvera. And, because it’s Virgin Mobile, they wanted something a little audacious and social-by-design. We embarked on a content-led campaign featuring one-of-a-kind talent to drive awareness of the partnership and get consumers engaged, and ultimately drive new customer acquisition. Our talent, Reggie Watts, brought the message to life in a hugely entertaining and memorable way, resulting in Virgin Mobile not just smashing their customer acquisition target by 100%, but reducing churn amongst their existing customer database by 30% throughout the campaign.

People can’t conceptualise data in tangible terms. And when it comes to music streaming, it’s impossible to visualise how many songs 1GB gets you. Australians think about distance and numbers in time. It’s not 3936 kilometres from Sydney to Perth, it’s 40 hours. Equating numbers to time is simpler to digest – it’s tangible and quantifiable. So, to appease Australians’ concerns about music streaming eating into their data, we applied the same thinking by talking about it in terms they’d relate to – time. 1GB of data became 21 hours of music. We launched the campaign content via a targeted seeding and editorial strategy, distributing the video across Virgin Mobiles owned channels, following an exclusive editorial placement on one of the country’s top-rated consumer culture websites. The campaign content was supported via digital and social media buys and a targeted editorial outreach program.