ORCON + IGGY

Short List
TitleORCON + IGGY
BrandORCON
Product / ServiceBROADBANDspe
EntrantSPECIAL GROUP Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Entrant Company:SPECIAL GROUP Auckland, NEW ZEALAND
Advertising Agency:SPECIAL GROUP Auckland, NEW ZEALAND

Credits

Credits

Name Company Position
Tony Bradbourne Special Group Creative Director
Rob Jack Special Group Creative Director
Heath Lowe Special Group Creative Director
Michael Redwood Special Group Managing Partner
Claire Beatson Special Group Strategic Planner
Sean McCready Frontier Media Media Planner
Sascha Mortimer Special Group TV Producer
Hamish Wanhil Liberation Interactive Producer
Matt Noonan Curious Executive Producer
Darryl Ward Curious Director
Luke Haigh Curious Editor
Andy Mauger Curious Producer
Nigel Mortimer Curious VFX Artist
Alfred Figueroa Crescent Moon Studios Sound Engineer
John Cooper Liquid Studios Sound Engineer
Jordan Stone Round Head Studios Sound Engineer
Quentin Reade Pead PR PR
Scott Barlett Orcon CEO
David Joyce Orcon Head of Sales and Marketing
Duncan Blair Orcon Brand and Comms Manager

The Campaign

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. 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 Pop's studio in Miami, and re-recording the classic track 'The Passenger'.

Success of the Campaign

- We received 200 video auditions in 10 days, a superb talent pool from which to select our nine band-members. - Auditions were 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 campaign had even run. - And Orcon’s sales increased 30% on previous year.

Describe how the campaign/entry was launched and executed across each channel in the order of implementation.

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. All this activity was hugely amplified by an extensive PR campaign. Entrants uploaded auditions directly to a specially built facebook application (which included musical tuition features) where they could be browsed by the public. Nine Kiwi musicians were then selected by Iggy and hooked up via Orcon Broadband from their homes to Iggy's studio in Miami. Over the course of a day (that was streamed live to Orcon's facebook fans) a completely new version of "The Passenger" was laid down. The event was recorded and broadcast TVCs and online video content created and run.