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.

Execution

We kicked off the PR story with a fake ad for Ian’s faux small business that ran unbranded and was picked up online, on social and on prime television. With the curiosity piqued we then followed up with a 3-minute mockumentary. And a fully integrated campaign that highlighted the partnership, and explained the promotion. National Morning Show Sunrise ran a live morning segment with Ian covering the promotion and also discussing the “sympathetic challenges of training for the Olympics and running a small business”. This was also followed up by a live segment on KIIS radio with Kyle and Jackie O.

Tier 1: Overall we generated over 4000 new business leads with over 50% non-Optus customer entries and a highly engaged audience driving 40% in return visitors on site traffic, with an average of 3m 28s spent on site across all visitors. Tier 2: There were 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 Emily Blatchford of The Huffington Post, “Well played, Thorp-tus. Well played.” The small business community agreed, with the campaign driving over 4000 new business leads. Key publications we featured in: • The Huffington Post • News.com.au • Business Insider • Herald Sun • Gizmodo • NBCSN • The Daily Telegraph • The News Daily • Pedestrian • Yahoo News Live interviews and segments: • Sunrise • KIIS 1065 • Gruen Transfer Tier 3: As a result of the campaign SMB sales are up 40% YoY for the campaign period.

The Situation

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. From the attention of business and sport enthusiasts, to the LGBT community, this widely appealing story captured the world’s attention. Ian, who’d been quiet in the news since publically coming out in 2014, was an unexpectedly natural comedic talent - making the campaign even more newsworthy.

The Strategy

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.