The Campaign

There are a million SKY TV subscribers in New Zealand. When you have to post them a bill every month, it’s a huge cost to SKY, and the environment. So to encourage customers to sign up to email billing, we gave them a really good reason not to get their bill in the post. Meet Lloyd – the creepy guy who licks the envelope your bill comes in.

Success of the Campaign

Lloyd became the most unpopular person in New Zealand. So unpopular, that 35% of SKY subscribers switched to email billing in the first two months. As a result of the campaign, SKY now has the biggest email billing penetration of any company in New Zealand. The campaign saved them over $300,000 dollars annually in postage, and a small forest worth of paper. However, there was a small group of people out there who found a deeper connection with Lloyd and campaigned for him to keep his job. They sent Lloyd personal letters of encouragement to keep on licking. We think if Lloyd can’t put them off their mail, nothing will.

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

We introduced Lloyd in a 30’’ TV spot, who sits alone in a room silently licking and sealing peoples bills. The graphic appears: Get your SKY bill via email, not Lloyd. This was followed by 15’’ TV spots that made Lloyd more repulsive, by showing him eating hard-boiled eggs and sculling coffee, then licking people’s bills. Then we made him even stranger, with Print ads, animated licking banners and ‘Officially sealed by Lloyd’ stickers on people’s real bills. If that didn’t make people switch, we sent them a video with their name and address tracked onto an envelope that Lloyd was licking.