The Brief

Orcon is a New Zealand telecommunications company. Despite offering faster broadband and superior customer service, it was relatively unknown in a market dominated by the huge corporates (Vodafone and Telecom). The agency’s overall brief was therefore to raise awareness of this superior broadband offering. Our strategy was to communicate this by staging a major online event – in effect a mass product demonstration - and build awareness of Orcon by engaging the nation with it. While we had to attract new customers to the brand, every stage of the campaign began by communicating firstly with existing Orcon customers.

Creative Execution

Orcon is an internet company and in every aspect of this campaign, from the call for auditions, through the facebook activity to the Play live with Iggy event itself, the internet was central. While every telco talks up its product and services, the strength and originality of this campaign was that Orcon actually used its broadband to enable a world-first technical feat – connecting nine Kiwis from their homes across New Zealand to Iggy’s studio in Miami, and re-recording the classic track 'The Passenger'.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

We created a world-first event, a chance to re-record 'The Passenger', live online, with Iggy Pop. Our direct response objective was two-fold: Attract a large enough pool of talented auditions to ensure we could select our virtual band. Maximise the country’s engagement with the auditioning process. The call for auditions went out first to Orcon’s customer base, to its facebook friends, and via online advertising. This was then extended by 15” TVCs and street posters calling for people to Play live with Iggy Pop. Entrants then uploaded auditions directly to a specially built facebook application, where they could be browsed.

Results

We received 200 video auditions in 10 days, a superb talent pool to select our nine band-members from. - Auditions viewed more than 100,000 times on facebook, part of an explosion of interest in the campaign. National press, prime-time current affairs TV shows, websites and blogs all over the world picked it up. - 3,500 new Orcon facebook friends in just 2 weeks. - The campaign generated over NZ$650,000 of unpaid media coverage before the TV ad had even run. - And Orcon’s sales increased 30% on previous year.