BRICK PHONE

TitleBRICK PHONE
BrandCIRCLES.LIFE
Product / ServiceTELCO DATA PLAN
CategoryB01. Mailing
EntrantVML SEA & INDIA Singapore, SINGAPORE
Idea Creation VML SEA & INDIA Singapore, SINGAPORE

Credits

Name Company Position
Joaquim Laurel VML SEA & India Creative Director
Andrew Yap VML SEA & India Art Director
JoonWon Lee VML SEA & India Art Director
Isheeta Punjabi VML SEA & India Copywriter
Evonne Chan VML SEA & India Project Manager
Dilip Garga VML SEA & India Senior Planning Manager

The Campaign

New phones often launch in the holiday season, and the iPhone X launch had taken over telco category in Singapore in 2017. While the big three telcos of Singapore spent huge marketing dollars to promote their iPhone X + SIM plans, we wanted to prove our point without breaking the bank. We hijacked the conversation by launching our own phone ‘The Brick’ – a parody of the iPhone X. Our idea was simple. Even the latest shiny phone is only as good as a brick without adequate data. So instead of “hitting a brick wall”, we wanted Singaporeans to consider the 20GB for $20 plan at Circles.Life – the best data plan that you can get in Singapore.

Creative Execution

The Brick Phone was released on 7 December 2017 through an influencer marketing and PR strategy that was later on supplemented by a social media campaign on Facebook and Instagram. The ‘Brick Phones’, were distributed to a select list of public figures, trade media and online personalities including technology bloggers. To ‘un-brick’ their phones, recipients were given an additional 1GB of data per month for a lifetime and an SGD $20 discount on registration fees from a no-contract plan with Circles.Life, all in the spirit of gifting in the holiday season. The ‘unboxing’ videos of our influencers gave wings to our direct mails and struck a chord with the young, data-consuming consumer that we wanted to hit.

Results

The Brick Phone provided Circles.Life with a whole new crowd of subscribers, witnessing a 37% increase in registrations after the campaign launch. Comparing the data from January 2017 vs the data of December 2017, Circles.Life saw a 4.4 times growth in website traffic. The PR efforts accompanying the campaign led to trade media coverage in Singapore with Circles.Life gaining SGD $37,500 of earned media. Public figures, trade media and online personalities including technology bloggers also contributed to the momentum of the campaign. These public figures were in splits when they received our new ‘phone’ and were quick to post a classic unboxing video on their social media channels, further increasing amplification to over 285k potential followers. On social platforms, the campaign increased Circles.Life reach on Facebook by 14%, further enlarging the telco’s audience.

The central idea for this campaign was to reach influencers directly. We didn’t want to beat around the bush with peripheral media, displays, emails or ads – we wanted people to receive a real, tangible object that would help them feel the futility of phone without data. To prove our point, we mailed influencers an actual brick, as a phone. We included headphones and a charging cable which couldn’t be inserted into the brick, to show that no matter how fancy your new phone is and what accessories you have, without data, it’s just a brick.

In Singapore, a staggering 87% used their phones to access the internet and internet-driven activities like WhatsApp, Instagram, etc, (GWI Q2 2017), and 4GB plans weren’t enough. WhatsApp Calls were replacing phone calls. Surely, telcos would have kept up, right? Surprisingly, even in this data heavy era, Singaporean telcos offered an average of only 4GB data per month. Telcos still focused on lengthy contracts that bound their consumers in on the promise of a new phone but a poor data plan. Unsurprisingly, 90% Singaporeans revealed their frustration at current data plans in a Circles.Life research. Circles.Life wasn’t offering a package with the latest phones, but offered the best plan in the country - 20GB of data for $20. It was a battle of data vs. new phone, and consumers needed to know that it was, in fact, our product (more data) that was most relevant to them.

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