FOUR OPERATORS TEAM UP AGAINST FRAUDSTERS

TitleFOUR OPERATORS TEAM UP AGAINST FRAUDSTERS
BrandMPT, TELENOR, OOREDOO, MYTEL
Product / ServiceVOICE AND DATA
EntrantERA MYANMAR Yangon, MYANMAR
Idea Creation ERA MYANMAR Yangon, MYANMAR
Media Placement ERA MYANMAR Yangon, MYANMAR
PR ERA MYANMAR Yangon, MYANMAR
Production ERA MYANMAR Yangon, MYANMAR

Credits

Name Company Position
Anthony Larmon ERA Myanmar MD
Thuta Lynn ERA Myanmar Account Manager
Su Shwe Yee Htun ERA Myanmar Head of Insights

Why is this work relevant for Integrated?

This was not only a channel-integrated campaign, but a multi-stakeholder initiative. We had to work with online/digital content in the form of a bank to distribute to telecommunications partners, media and others along with proactive media outreach with the same content to traditional media publications and broadcast.

Background

“I have been getting multiple missed calls from unknown numbers repeatedly. I gave them a missed call back and MPT deducted 2000 kyats from my balance when I call back.” This is one of thousands of complaints indicating the huge public knowledge deficit on this issue. And it wasn’t just our client, but all four of Myanmar’s Telecom Operators were receiving multiple fraud calls – with many users complaining about the balance deduction and blaming operators for their financial loss. A whole industry fell under intense criticism for not taking steps to equip customers with knowledge to handle mitigating their potential for becoming victims while using phone services. Legal/policy and other regulations for cybercrime, are not clearly established or enforced by authorities, so businesses have a de facto responsibility in the eyes of many publics to use their resources and educate the newly-minted smartphone users.

Describe the creative idea

Engage all the operators to be a team. The agency immediately proposed to engage all four operators under one campaign and led the coordination between the four. Our collaborative initiative on mobile scams would be an education campaign with three pillars: demonstrate a joint commitment to protecting consumers, empower customers to use telco and digital services safely and to give tips and tactics on dealing with unwanted calls or screening for cybercrimes. We then would lead the creation of “open source” content for media to use and use our skills in media relations to generate gestures of partnership and cooperation between big telcos and all the media.

Describe the strategy

Our agency took lead in working between various communications departments to develop content to be distributed on every operator’s owned channels. This is the first time in Myanmar’s history that the highly competitive telecommunications companies joined forces for the good of the whole public – and the idea came from an agency (ours). By creating the content as “open source” – it meant we could encourage media and our telecommunications partners alike to take and adapt for their readers, users, customers and more – making it more than simple “branded” outreach because the recipients could brand it how they wanted. Furthermore, for every earned print story we used it to pitch to media’s web desks and earn additional online coverage –note in the results that for every print story earned, we pitched more than 100% to get the same stories covered online in the interest of data users and youth.

Describe the execution

Develop the messaging around our pillars, create social, video, press and infographic content around each of them and then using a shared folder for final versions that each could take and adapt for their own uses. We reached rural and older users by targeting broadcast and print through traditional and broadcast news releases displaying logos of all the operators. Urban and younger users received a flurry of social content in the form of infographic, video and photo slideshow content on all operator’s social media. We managed the social media for MPT already so it was easy to create and schedule on-brand and telco-appropriate content for everyone (operators and media) to use. Our team handled pitching and media outreach on behalf of all operators. Leveraging public interest and our team’s relationships with the journalism community, the infographics hit print as full-page color in tier-1 outlets alongside our news release.

List the results

This is a case where the numbers are more than vanity metrics. Every one of our 50+ print stories, 4 broadcast news segments, 52 web articles and 76 social media articles/shares by media combined to hit nearly every kind of customer we could have hoped for with just the right information. By modest estimates our 180+ stories and our content reach exceeded 30 million and likely approached 40 million. These were gathered from measurable sources like website traffic, social media performance figures which media were happy to share with us and estimated circulations of print (self-audited and NOT accounting for pass-along-rates). 100% of media pitched covered our news, and in many cases went beyond in giving us page space for our infographic and going in-depth into the issue. The hotline set up by the operators saw plenty of use as well and today we hear little of our gateway friends.

Links

Case Film URL