FRIENDVERTISING
SKINNY
Issue 56 | September 2020
Agency
Colenso BBDO
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Levi Slavin Creative Directors Thomas Darlow, Beth O’Brien Copywriter Michael Swinburn Art Director Luke Dawson
Production Team
Head of TV Natasha Gill Delivery Director Serena Fountain-Jones
Other Credits
Senior Planner Amy Pollock Business Director Emma Leisegang Business Manager Elsi Gibbs
Date
March 2020
Background
Skinny is a low-cost telco from New Zealand.
They have only 20% of the ad spend of their nearest competitor, but double the Net Promoter Score, the willingness of customers to recommend Skinny to others, registered at a whopping +55.
The task was to grow the brand by driving acquisition and raising Skinny’s brand consideration metrics from 37% to 40%, and credibility from 34% - 38%.
Idea
New Zealand is a small country which famously has only a few degrees of separation.
Armed with a Nielsen report on the efficacy of word of mouth, which proclaimed that recommendations from friends and family are 92% more effective than advertisements, the idea was to let Skinny’s happy customers do the selling for them.
Friend-vertising was a nationwide campaign designed to reach everyone in New Zealand with an ad for Skinny, hosted by someone they knew.
46 different customers featured in 46 different commercials, with hundreds of executions in OOH, newspaper, digital and social settings. Using a bespoke media algorithm, the friends, families and acquaintances of the 46 were all targeted.
If any other happy customers felt left out, they could generate their own ads online and start sharing them.
Results
The campaign was launched one week before Covid-19 restrictions came into force. Regardless, credibility rose by 8% to 42%, and consideration also increased 4% from to 41%.
Our Thoughts
This is one of those data-driven campaigns that will have started with a lot of maths. How many influencers do you need to reach the whole of New Zealand? It turns out to be 46.
This is a brilliant example of personalisation.
Thanks to precision targeting, recipients online only get to see the ad that features their neighbour/mate/cousin. On TV, though, it works rather differently. On the launch night, the commercial ran 15 times. Exactly the same ad but with a different customer in the lead role. Where the ads work in digital media as personal recommendations, in broadcast media they work as testimonials.
Clever and funny.