The Campaign

Instead of launching a promotion, we launched a small business. We started with The Olympics for Small Business, a prize so good even ex-Olympians are starting small businesses to win it. Our PR-led integrated campaign saw Australian icon Ian Thorpe as the CEO and founder of Thorpedo Pool Cleaning – a fake small business we set up. Ian became the star of our fully integrated and highly targeted campaign, with everything leading to olympicsforsmallbusiness.com – an easy-to-navigate user experience that helped SMB owners set up their own entry page, as well as start a conversation with their customers to vote for them.

Creative Execution

The campaign launched with a tweet from Ian. Kicking off the story with the fake ad for Ian’s faux small business that ran across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to tease Ian’s ad for Thorpedo Pool Cleaning. We also created a small business Facebook page for his business allowing people to rate and review his business while it seemed legitimate. We then followed up by releasing a 3-minute mockumentary explaining “The Small Business Olympics” and why Ian entered, encouraging them to enter and retargeting with display and paid social advertising. From the attention of business and sport enthusiasts, to the crew of Sunrise or Kylie & Jackie O on KISS radio, to the LGBT community, this widely appealing story captured the world’s attention.

Our campaign exceeded targets on all three of our ambitious tasks: 1) In total there was 72 premium pieces of editorial coverage, with an estimated reach of 52.7m and an editorial value of $2.8m all positively applauding the campaign. This was best summarised by the words of Emily Blatchford from The Huffington Post, “Well played, Thorp-tus. Well played.” The small business community agreed, with the campaign driving over 4000 new business leads. 2) This wasn’t only enjoyed by Optus customers, with over 50% of entries coming from non-Optus customers. This platform also allowed for continued engagement during the campaign driving 40% in return visitors on site traffic, with an average of 3m 28s spent on site across all visitors. 3) Most importantly the campaign helped drive hard business sales, with SMB sales up 40% YoY during the campaign period.

Our research showed that SMB’s are either spoken to like consumers or like big businesses. No one speaks to them like normal people. We partnered with an Australian Icon, Olympian Ian Thorpe to create an entertaining piece of social content that engaged SMB’s through showing a ‘day in the life of a small business owner’, with a sense of humour. SMB’s are time poor and highly stressed, this light hearted approach depicted ‘all too real’ scenarios they could relate to allowing us to hold their attention, and then enter our promotional competition for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rio

Partnering with Olympian Ian Thorpe, we launched a teaser ad for Thorpedo Pool Cleaning, which after creating a social and PR buzz we followed up with a mockumentary documenting his attempt to run a business that could win “The Small Business Olympics”. We targeted this content to SMB groups on social using a single minded CTA, to drive click-throughs to the promotional website for entries. The website allowed businesses to register for the grand prize whilst also allowing suppliers and customers to show support, by voting for them. To make things even simpler for SMBs, we gave them $10k to offer and a downloadable campaigner kit to help them engage with their suppliers and customers for support to win. By opening our competition to all SMB’s we could invite non-Optus customers to enter and upsell products to them, whilst using our existing customers to promote the competition to their wider network.