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Man vs Network

Maxis Berhad

Issue 36 | September 2015

Agency

Ogilvy Malaysia

Creative Team

Chief Creative Officer Gavin Simpson Creative Director Rafael Guida Art Director ChinWei Wong Copywriter Terri Chen OgilvyOne Hong Kong, Copywriter Collin Yeoh Mojo Films, Director Barney Chua

Date

November 2014

Background

All the telcos in Malaysia were making the same claims about being "the fastest". The challenge was to overcome the distrust and get Malaysians to believe what Maxis said about their service.

Idea

How do you get people to engage with relatively dull topics such as broadband speed and buffering? The answer was by creating a series of elaborate tests, each of which put on the line the life of Morten Baangsgaard, Maxis' Chief Technology Officer.

So, for the buffering test, a huge industrial saw closed in on Morten and would only stop when the video he was uploading fully loaded.

In another test, Morten (with beef-steaks attached to his suit) was put in a cage with a tiger. The safety barrier only came down when the music file was downloaded.

Results

Morten survived all the tests, proving to millions of sceptical viewers that Maxis really did deliver on its claims.

Our Thoughts

This is a good old-fashioned torture test. Perhaps it fell foul of the judges because it looks too much like advertising, telling an explicit story about the product. And what they were looking for was implicit – stories about behaviours rather than about brands.