The Brief

The brief was to grow the subscriber base of Bayan DSL, the fourth and smallest player in the broadband category. The target was made up of young adults who used the internet the most. But Bayan DSL had less than 10% of its competitors' budget, and could not compete with their promise of high internet speed. Its only virtue was that we could claim it was easier to use.

Creative Execution

While the competitions’ ads showed hip and happening people, we turned a 66-year old called Grandma Techie (Lola Techie) into an internet celebrity. The idea: 'Bayan DSL makes it easy. ' Virals and TVCs showed she could video chat, play shoot-em-up games, respond to Youtube hits and a local celebrity's sex video. She had accounts in all the popular social networking sites, and a team of online responders kept these active, interacting with consumers as many as 7,000 times per week. All these led the target to www.lolatechie.com, where they could fill in a subscription form for Bayan DSL.

Describe the creative solution to the brief/objective.

A team of online responders kept her active in popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Multiply and Plurk, which resulted in as many as 7,000 interactions with consumers in a single week. In just two months, Grandma Techie became a viral hit and internet celebrity in the Philippines with over 95,000 Facebook fans and free media free media impressions worth P144 million (six times the value of Bayan DSL's paid media). Customer inquiries rose by 700% and the subscriber base by 9% in a short amount of time.

Results

In just two months, GrandmaTechie became a viral hit and internet celebrity in the Philippines with over 95,000 Facebook fans and free media impressions worth P144 million (six times the value of Bayan DSL's paid media). The results were phenomenal: Customer inquiries rose by 700% and Bayan DSL's subscriber base by 45%.