HACKDIVATE: BE A LEGEND AND DO GOOD

TitleHACKDIVATE: BE A LEGEND AND DO GOOD
BrandTELSTRA
Product / ServiceCISCO CLOUD SERVICES
CategoryB08. Digital Design
EntrantBRAINS DESIGN Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Entrant Company BRAINS DESIGN Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Advertising Agency BRAINS DESIGN Sydney, AUSTRALIA
Media Agency OMD SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

Credits

Name Company Position
Andrew Ward Telstra Group Marketing Manager
Andrew Guesdon Telstra Campaign Executive
Oanh-Vu Dang Telsta Alliances Marketing Manager
Dof Dickinson Brains Design Head of Creative Services
Troy Smith Brains Design Art Director
Emma Barrett Brains Design Senior Account Manager
Rachel Courtright Brains Design Account Director
Daniel Murdolo Brains Design Web developer
Nigel Allen Brains Design Animator/Editor
Sebastian Danta Brains Design Animator/Editor

Brief Explanation

The brief was straightforward: convince techies working or consulting to large corporations that Telstra has a suite of brilliant cloud technologies to help them solve their IT challenges, innovate and compete. Our business goals were to raise awareness and enthusiasm for cloud services, and initiate a sales pipeline. Our strategic goals were to increase positive brand associations and convince our audience that Telstra was a highly relevant and forward-thinking partner for cloud services.

The Brief

Telstra, Australia’s foremost telecommunications company, was looking to raise awareness and uptake of their cloud services. A recent brand survey had found ‘declining consideration for Telstra within the enterprise marketplace’ with some IT professionals only turning to Telstra only when it came to connecting the network or deploying a standard phone/mobile solution. The IDG magic quadrant showed Telstra as the challenger brand facing stiff competition from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft and a host of other players. The budget was $150K split across creative and media.

How the final design was conceived

We undertook collaborative brainstorming with Telstra and looked into demographic and psychographic research into the developer community. A recent brand survey had found ‘declining consideration for Telstra within the enterprise marketplace’ with some IT professionals turning to Telstra only when it came to connecting the network or deploying a standard phone/mobile solution. The IDG magic quadrant showed Telstra as the challenger brand facing stiff competition from the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft and other global players. Looking at how competitors were targeting the same audience revealed a slew of ads featuring IT data centres or images of the cloud and messaging that centred around security, flexibility and scalability – all category attributes, but not brand differentiators. We realised we needed to stand out as different. And to potentially approach the market in a far less direct manner, or we would simply disappear in a slew of similar cloud ads. Brand persona research and recommendations found that IT pros were powerful technology decision influencers, who also enjoyed development and computer games. Realising that our audience were not just smart, but also playful encouraged us to look engaging them in an activity, and potentially using graphics, reminiscent of computer games characters.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The campaign increased awareness and preference for the Telstra brand and cloud solutions, amplifying its impact far beyond the event. Thanks to well-targeted digital, social, community outreach and video we easily filled the places for 60 IT pros. To date the campaign has had a unique reach of 629,527 IT professionals with a 0.30% CTR (benchmark is 0.20%) to the Hackdivate landing page. Social media activity at the event was amplified across a Twitter reach of 1,016,420 accounts. The Hackdivate content series filmed during the event (targeting C-Suite and IT influencers) has received over 200K views with a 75% average completion rate and 0.58% CTR to Cisco Cloud Services page at the end of the video (benchmark is 0.2%). It created positive brand associations: during the event there were a total of 357 mentions of Hackdivate, and Telstra being mentioned in relation to Hackdivate over 173 times on Twitter, with key words including awesome, amazing, non-for-profit. Seven life-changing solutions were developed with five deployed for the organisations to date– from a support app to help cancer patients connect with care teams to an incident report log to help keep Sydney’s streets safe.