Results and Effectiveness

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%.

Creative Execution

While competitor's used hip and happening people in their advertising, we turned a 66-year old grandmother into an internet celebrity. The idea: 'Bayan DSL makes it easy. ' Virals showed how Grandma Techie (Lola Techie) could video chat, play shoot-em-up online games, respond to Youtube hits, and even to a local celebrity's sex video. To reinforce her tech-savvy character, we made sure she had online accounts in all the popular social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter, Multiply, Youtube and Plurk. A team of online responders kept her active online and resulted in as many as 7,000 interactions with the target in a single week. Grandma Techie's virals and social media accounts all led the target to www.lolatechie.com, where they could fill in a subscription form for Bayan DSL.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

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.