Face Up To Poverty
Optus Telecommunications
Issue 7 | July 2008
Agency
M&C Saatchi/Mark
Creative Team
Gavin McLeod - Creative Director;Susan Dearn, Simon Maggs - Art Directors;George Shaw, Dave Lucas - Copywriters
Production Team
Elly Gillis, Tammi Luiker - Online Producers
Other Credits
Ana Wilson, Lee Bachar-Adlar - Account Service
Date
July 2007
Background
Optus – Australia’s second largest telecommunications company – wanted to stimulate revenue by increasing the use of MMS amongst their customers. Usage was extremely low, because people didn’t really understand how it works. So the agency’s brief was to encourage Optus customers, particularly the youth segment (16 to 26-year-olds), to start using MMS. Not an easy task, as previous campaigns had failed to generate much response.
Idea
M&C Saatchi/Mark’s idea was to leverage Optus’s sponsorship of poverty awareness charity Make Poverty History (MPH). The charity’s efforts centred on the date 07-07-07 (‘Zero Seven’) to convince governments to commit to 0.7% Gross National Income in foreign aid.
The agency created FACE UP TO POVERTY in conjunction with MPH to encourage customers to support the campaign by MMS’ing their faces to the world’s largest-ever visual petition. With a Federal election imminent, timing was ideal. The campaign also ran alongside a ‘Zero Seven’ music tour. The cost of every MMS was donated to MPH to support the cause. The idea was that once people were familiar with MMS they would continue to use it long term.
Results
The previous user-generated campaign had generated 2,000 MMS entries. This time, the website received 13,500 entries (an increase of 575%) in just four weeks, with 18,854 unique visitors - making it Optus’s most successful user-generated campaign to date. The Opposition Leader, who was subsequently elected to Prime Minister, pledged to commit to the 0.7% GNI. MPH undertook to continue hosting the site so that it truly could become the world’s largest visual petition.
Our Thoughts
We’ve noticed that we are getting increasing numbers of mobile marketing ideas. Finally agencies are getting to grips with this important new medium even if phone users still don’t want to use MMS as much as the operating companies want us to. This is an ingenious way of getting its core target audience of the under-26’s to start using the technology - but surely a lot of them would have felt Optus was being unpleasantly cynical in hijacking such a worthy cause for commercial gain?